
The "Do I Look Like I Give A Shit" Public Licence - samuellevy
http://blog.samuellevy.com/post/46-do-i-look-like-i-give-a-shit-public-licence.html
======
tptacek
'DannyBee, who is an attorney who IIRC specializes in exactly this subject,
has suggested that these funny, funny jokes could plausibly come at the
expense of your house, probably many years after you forgot you made the joke.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733477](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733477)

Long story short, no matter how hilarious and concise your license is, you
probably want to disclaim warranty, and in the form everyone else uses.

~~~
gojomo
No progress comes without risk.

There's plenty of untested FUD, well exemplified by your linked comment, about
how someday somehow someone might screw you, if you don't follow all the right
lawyerly-approved licensing incantations. If someone wants to minimize risk
and fuss, they should surely follow the lawyer-recommended course.

But if they've got other goals, such as testing whether the FUD is true, and
maybe eventually getting the legal precedents established that such lawyerly
boilerplate isn't necessary for free uncompensated sharing of code, then they
might follow another course. That other course might sometimes infuriate
potential code-reusers, and appear reckless to experts about the traditional
order. But once aware of the risks, it's the licensor's own chance to take.

Of course, YMMV, IANAL, etc.

(If there is any case of an open-source author being sued in a manner where
simply having attached the right license boilerplate would have saved them,
that would make an excellent front-page HN story.)

~~~
jsmeaton
Yep. The whole system seems backwards.

"This software is safe for use in a nuclear reactor". Not "this software, that
I made in highschool for the lulz, is not safe to be used in a nuclear
reactor".

Software should come with guarantees if guarantees are needed. It should not
come with an exhaustive list of non-guarantees.

~~~
sthatipamala
You expect merchantability of products all the time. Otherwise, people could
sell you all kinds of products with known, dangerous defects (e.g your car).
Why should software be different?

~~~
jsmeaton
Packaged software that is sold, to me, is different to code that you put up on
GitHub for safe keeping. But I still think we've gone in the wrong direction.

And to your example regarding cars, such a guarantee _could_ be "this car is
safe to drive on [roads]". Replace "roads" with the legal name for surfaces
where cars can be driven.

The underlying problem though is that there are such a large number of people
that refuse to take responsibility for their own actions. "But, your honour,
the guarantee said I could drive on roads. It didn't mention anything about
being blind folded while doing so. It wasn't my fault I'm now paralysed".

A pretty ridiculous example; and probably a naive one as well. But the law
systems we live with are way too complicated. And I feel the people, whose job
is to "interpret" the law (judges) are doing a terrible job upholding the
spirit of law.

------
i386
Can we please just be mature about the realities of licensing? It's serious
business.

In my experience the the worst licenses to deal with are the ones that lawyers
have not had a hand in specifying the language used (With the exception of
anything that's been written by someone on retainer at Oracle).

It's not hard to copy a MIT or Apache license file into your repositories and
push it.

~~~
gojomo
Some people's disgust with the giant castles of complexity created by
licensing is "serious business", too.

~~~
conroy
The MIT license is 167 words, hardly a "giant castle of complexity"

    
    
      $ cat mit.txt | wc 
         19     167    1065
      $ cat bsd.txt | wc
         10     219    1479
      $ cat CC0.txt | wc
         29     978    6384

~~~
gojomo
It's not their dissatisfaction with those particular (most-permissive)
licensing choices that they are signalling. Rather, it's the tangled mess of
other twisty-licenses and license-interactions and license-debates (like this
one) that they've had to navigate.

You're essentially suggesting they should just shut up and maximize others'
convenience. OK, that's a valid opinion, and if their only goal is maximal
reuse, CC0 is great.

But their choice of crazy-ass license is an expressive act, like the coding
itself, and you haven't established why your convenience trumps their other
expressive goals.

------
greenyoda
Having a license like this could make your software unusable for companies who
need to get their licenses vetted by lawyers because they (and their
customers) are afraid of being sued for copyright infringement. Do your users
a favor by using one of the standard licenses (like the MIT License) that have
better-crafted legal language.

As far as I remember, all of the major free software licenses disclaim any
obligation to maintain the software, disclaim that the software is fit for any
specific task and state that the user uses it at their own risk.

~~~
gojomo
Scaring away those companies might be a plus, especially in this case.

~~~
viraptor
It's not that simple unfortunately. Here's an example of what could happen: A
is under the shit licence, B depends on A, lots of people use B. Among those
people is a big corporation, which needs their licences verified and they
decide the shit licence is not acceptable. They'll talk to B about making A
optional, replacing it, of will create an internal fork of it. If there's a
business case for it, it will happen. And no one else gains anything from
those solutions.

If you use a known licence at least there's a chance that those companies will
at some point contribute back instead of sitting on their internal patches.

I'm in that situation now with a couple of projects, but I have to patch them
locally only. I will not spend days with legal to approve a licence, sign a
contributor agreement, or some other form of ownership transfer. Both the
project and its users lose that way.

------
mechanical_fish
Open-source licenses aren't some kind of restraint that lawyers use to chain
down free software. They're the carefully-crafted wings that enable a free-
software ecosystem to fly at all.

Without the licenses free software doesn't get more free. It just dies.
Everybody runs away from it. Copyright law is clear: It belongs to the
original author, and without a clear transfer of rights, nobody dares to reuse
it except in secret. It's technically risky even to _read_ it, lest you
establish evidence that will later be used against you in a copyright suit.
And it's risky to offer the original author a patch without an explicit
disclaimer of warranty - after all, the author owns and controls the code, and
the fact that the codebase looked like comedy on Tuesday doesn't mean it won't
be part of a nuclear power plant by Friday night.

(Of course, when the lawsuit happens you'll probably be able to argue that the
use of your patch in a nuclear power plant wasn't authorized. But that
argument may have to be made to a jury, by a lawyer that is costing you a lot
of money.)

------
derefr
You know, it occurs to me--people like to have "LICENSEs" like these, even
though they're not legally binding (and in fact tend to break integration
legally-speaking), because they don't like legalese and don't want to try
reading through legalese to pick the legalese most representative of their
desires.

So, it'd be nice, I think, if we could create a _mapping_ between these sort
of "intention-based licenses" and the more legally-strict "implementation-
rule-based licenses." Like, to say, "code under the Do I Look Like I Give A
Shit License is, in practice, MIT-licensed" or something like that. And then
people can _pick_ a license based on intent (instead of reading legalese), and
have it _map_ to a license with full legal power.

\--or, cut out a step, and just give all the current legally-enforcable
licenses nice, human-friendly abstracts, for things like the GitHub LICENSE
chooser to display.

~~~
67726e
GitHub recently created a little site for this purpose. It's not exactly all
encompassing, but it covers the three major licenses:
[https://github.com/blog/1530-choosing-an-open-source-
license](https://github.com/blog/1530-choosing-an-open-source-license)

------
themodelplumber
Now draw a Venn diagram of the people who read the license vs. the people who
contact this developer for support

~~~
tekromancr
And in the convergence space is where the trolls live.

------
everettForth
I once worked on a project with 10 years of legacy code that entered into a
partnership with IBM.

We were required to audit every line of code used in the project, and state
whether we owned the code, or if the code was open source, what license was
used. (The bottom line is that IBM's lawyers were afraid we might be using GPL
code)

I would love to see how the lawyers respond to code under the "Do I Look Like
I Give A Shit" license.

Anyway, for people in this thread pleading to take these things more
seriously, it's because of real-life scenarios like I just described.

This is the kind of thing that could hold up a Multi-Million Dollar business
deal for weeks while the lawyers figure out what to do about using code with
this license.

More likely is that experienced management will prohibit developers from using
the code in the first place.

------
anotherhue
I read this, and the WTFPL as backlash against the concept of licensing
itself. That is, if you want to hack code and 'put it out there' you may not
want to deal with IP issues. I bounce back and forth between feeling that the
harsh language is crass and unhelpful versus an appropriate and sane reaction
to the legal mess that is IP.

~~~
tjaerv
Another such backlash is the Unlicense:
[http://unlicense.org/](http://unlicense.org/)

~~~
anotherhue
I've been using CC0, but that one looks like a better fit for software.
Thanks.

------
stfp
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL)

~~~
samuellevy
Yes, it's similar to the WTFPL, but only slightly more restrictive, in that it
tells the user to leave the author alone.

