
The Spite Software License - beckingz
https://github.com/voynix/spite-license
======
nneonneo
I mean, IANAL but there seems to be a trivial loophole here: have the company
lawyer read the license, lawyer determines there’s a trapdoor, and conveys the
contents to someone else. Nobody but the lawyer has to read it; everyone but
the lawyer can use the software. The license specifically refers to people and
not organizations...

~~~
badrabbit
Debatable. The lawyer is working for his clients therefore his reading of the
file binds the company to its conditions.

~~~
natcombs
Alternative: Publish a blog about the spite license, and then anyone who reads
the blog knows the contents, but has not read the license itself!

~~~
beckingz
License-rolling?

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TallGuyShort
>> Because you want randos on the Internet but not big companies with lawyers
who make their engineers actually read licenses to use your software

I don't understand this sentiment of just sticking it to big companies because
they're big and employ lawyers. The problem is the opposite: when a company
has no excuse to do scummy things because they can afford lawyers, but they do
scummy things regardless. I'd love it if big companies embraced the GPL more.
But if they just ignored it that would be terrible, and sometimes they do.

Sometimes hospitals have (on paper) a policy to ensure patients have been
informed of and understood their rights, so they have you sign a form
acknowledging this. That's a good thing! But in practice they often get an
image of your signature from you and then add it to the form knowing full well
you haven't seen it.

I feel like the attitude of this license is that it's cooler for randos to do
the latter than for big companies to do the former. It's backwards if you
actually care about the rule of law and equity.

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zdw
Well, I just lost The Game.

~~~
beckingz
That is a good summary of the license's intent.

~~~
hashkb
Clarify: do you think the Game is about spite?

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praptak
If you want randos on the internet but not big corps, then probably the latest
GPL is the best bet.

Or just put "non commercial use" somewhere in the text.

~~~
Lammy
AGPL _

~~~
marcan_42
The AGPL is a terrible license that is extremely vague and unclear. Please
don't use it. Depending on how you interpret it, it's either completely
useless (can be trivially worked around, thus giving you no extra protections
over the GPL) or imposes onerous requirements on all your users, including the
developers themselves. It is not a Free Software copyright license, but rather
an EULA, since it imposes conditions beyond redistribution and also on usage
(a big difference). As far as I know it has not seriously been tested in court
and I don't see that ending well when it happens.

I recently found out that I may be violating the AGPL because I use dspam with
my mail server, because I run Gentoo Linux, and the Gentoo ebuild includes a
patch, so by installing dspam I have applied a patch to it (since Gentoo
builds from source), and then put it on the internet, and I'm not including
some kind of offer for the patched dspam source code for people who connect to
my mail server (I don't even know how I'd do that). I didn't even know dspam
was AGPL, all I did was install a package (but Gentoo unfortunately considers
AGPL as Free Software and allows it by default with no explicit acceptance
required, unlike corporate EULAs which they do force you to acknowledge by
default, so I was clueless about it). It's just a huge massive can of worms of
a license. Just don't.

~~~
Lammy
How else do you deal with (aiui) “cloud” loophole in traditional GPL?

~~~
marcan_42
Well, first you need to decide if it's worth caring about that, because in
order to deal with it you _have_ to impose restrictions beyond redistribution,
which means your license is no longer a pure copyright license, which arguably
means it violates Freedom Zero and cannot qualify as a Free Software license
per the FSF's own definition (of course they say the AGPL does, as it's their
own license, but by a strict reading, it doesn't; by a looser reading it does,
but it is also toothless). (It would qualify as open source under the OSI
definition, but the OSI definition is unfortunately really poor in this
regard, as it does not require lack of usage restrictions; you could say "you
can't run my app on more than one CPU core or have more than 4 simultaneous
users" and that license would still meet the OSI guidelines!)

Now, _if_ you're prepared to make that concession... I don't know what to tell
you. The AGPL is a terrible option as I've mentioned. However, the FSF
deliberately made the GPLv3 and AGPLv3 an interoperable pair, so if you want
to link with GPLed software, you have no other option. If you don't have any
GPLed dependencies, you could write your own license, and properly spell out
what "remote network interaction" means for your app (and _especially_ how
transitive it is to being integrated into other systems, interaction with
proxies, frontends, etc - all of which the AGPL is completely mute on), and
how the source should be distributed. Ideally you'd build in a source code
offer mechanism into your network protocol and make the app able to serve its
own source code, so as to not burden your users with licensing traps they have
to take explicit action on, and then make the licensing conditional on that.

In principle, since you can always make a license less strict via exceptions,
if you're willing to accept that the AGPL _may_ be completely ineffective at
closing the loophole depending on interpretation, then you could use the AGPL
and spell out what the required extent of the network interaction requirements
is in the form of an exception; this would lessen the problematic burden of
the AGPL on your users, but it doesn't buy you any extra protections, as you
can only go weaker, not stronger.

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SamReidHughes
Not hard wrapping the text files was a nice touch.

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peterwwillis
If I had a dime for every time a big company I've worked at has investigated
the licenses of the software it uses, I'd have fifty cents.

People tend to forget that big companies are really just collections of normal
people who are not lawyers and don't even think about licenses. If 5 levels of
managers haven't all been explicitly instructed to read random software
licenses or they're fired, the engineer's not gonna do it unless they feel
like it, and most don't feel like it. It mostly only comes up when legal goes
out of their way to make a stink about it, and they're not just continuously
demanding license information.

~~~
azeirah
I did an internship at Bosch a while ago, and I can say they take software
licenses very seriously.

~~~
snazz
Google takes licenses very seriously as well:
[https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-
no...](https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-not-allowed)

They certainly have a lot of eyes on them, so any mistake with licenses could
be very costly.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
I worked for an insurance data provider, and as part of our server upgrade,
the legal team requested licenses for all of software dependencies.

It was a bit of shell-scripting around conda env list, but it certainly wasn't
completely trivial to do.

------
msla
Here's the exclusive rights copyright gives you under American law:

[https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106](https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106)

> Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title
> has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:

> (1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;

> (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;

> (3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the
> public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or
> lending;

> (4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works,
> pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the
> copyrighted work publicly;

> (5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works,
> pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the
> individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display
> the copyrighted work publicly; and

> (6) in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work
> publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.

Note that _running the program_ is not listed in those exclusive rights. The
copyright owner doesn't have the exclusive right to run the program, so the
copyright owner cannot take it away from you, any more than I can take away
your right to wear yellow socks.

~~~
aidenn0
When you run a program, you are directing the computer to copy the program
into working memory.

~~~
saagarjha
Time to create a computer that runs entirely from disk without copying
anything into RAM.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
It's called XIP, and it's as weird as you'd expect:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execute_in_place](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execute_in_place)

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autarch
Any lawyers want to comment on this? My guess is that it's unenforceable
because you can't bind someone with a contract by sneak attack.

But it's funny.

~~~
troyjfarrell
It is funny. But it is also counterproductive. The Spite Software License
theoretically makes your code useful only to people who don't care about
licenses. But if the source code is published, it's already useful to those
people. For those who make the effort to be responsible and respect licenses,
the source code is useless. So Spite is probably a very good name for this.

edit: clarity

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vortico
This license assumes that "randos on the internet" don't read license texts.
Not true---I read every single one!

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X6S1x6Okd1st
Are there cases of a big corp actually using one of the weirder, but extremely
permissive, licenses like WTFPL?

~~~
jrockway
The big companies do not typically like these licenses, tending to read them
as "all rights reserved" instead of "do whatever you want". Here's Google's
explanation: [https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-
no...](https://opensource.google/docs/thirdparty/licenses/#wtfpl-not-allowed)

~~~
X6S1x6Okd1st
Yeah I would expect a no from the legal team at the company I worked at last.
Meanwhile I'd assume that most "randos on the internet" would be fairly comfy
using that license for their own use.

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jrott
so if you read the license file can you not license any of your stuff under
the spite license

~~~
moonchild
No. You always retain full copy right to your own works. You can choose to
license your work to somebody else on arbitrary terms (like, for instance, the
spite license), but that doesn't affect your right and ownership of the
software.

~~~
mpoteat
But since license terms and in general legal art is granted copyright _, does
one have the right to use the license for their own projects? That is, what is
the license of the license?

_ See various controversies surrounding provincial law text being under
copyright.

~~~
moonchild
Without an explicit license grant, you're not allowed to use copyrighted works
for any purpose (modulo fair use). There's no reason to assume a license is
licensed according to itself; most licenses aren't.

Without an explicit license grant, you wouldn't be allowed to use the license
for any reason.

In this case, it's unencumbered:

> I hereby abandon all rights and claims and release the text of the Spite
> License into the public domain.

------
beckingz
The Spite License:

The Spite License is, in essence, a trapdoor — it allows potential licensees
to use the software under the terms of the secondary license (as shown here,
the standard MIT license) if and only if they do not read the license file
itself.

~~~
notatoad
Heh, I have now read the license without reading any portion of the licence
file. Did we just find a loophole?

