The Purpose | Why? | The License | Verbose Explanation | When NOT To Use | How To

The Purpose

The purpose of this license is to create a short, light, and easily understood license for public works in less than 24 lines with no more than 80 characters per line. Why? So that the license is as simple and short as it can be. The most important difference between this license and many others is that it forces anyone who uses UPL'd works to give credit to the original authors along side the derivative authors' names.

Why?

Other Licenses

Many businesses and private developers refuse to touch GPL'd work. And as for BSD everyone copies and pastes code from BSD licenses willy nilly then pretending as if they did all of the work themselves. I just want to be given credit for the time I spend creating products and still be able to share them with the world.

Legalese

Legalese was originally intended to simplify and remove ambiguity from legal documents. These days legalese is essentially another language that one must be formally trained in to understand. That is why I wrote this license as simply as I could using English. Instead of using entire paragraphs of capitalized words I've never read in my life to convey that the creators are not liable; I simply wrote "the authors are not liable."

The License (A work in progress for now)

Download

license.txt the file the text below is loaded from.

Text of the License

Verbose Explanation

Definitions

You, the source author, make project A, source work, and license project A with this license.
Someone, a derivative author, comes along and uses your code from project A in project B, derivative work.

Freedoms

The Freedoms give rights to derivative authors.

• Freedom #0 basically states that you can GPL this code or combine it with GPL code (or any other license for that matter) as long as the original license is preserved and the clauses are all followed.


• Freedom #1 gives others the ability to redistribute the code or sell it.

Protections

The Protections establish rules that protect the source authors.

• Protection #0 Leave this license alone if you are a derivative author.


• Protection #1 is basically the entire reason for this license. Blood has been spilt in order for you to see this code. If a derivative author wants to put their name on a project then they better give credit where credit is due. This is NOT required, but if a derivative author wants credit they have to credit the source author. The intention here is that if Bob worked on a project and John used Bob's project in his own and John makes the claim he is the author without crediting Bob's work then that is wrong. The intention is not for companies to have to credit other companies, but for derivative authors (people) wanting credit to credit the source authors.
  
  What does this mean for companies then? If your programmers want to use my code and want credit for their own work on your product then they have to add me as one of the authors where ever their names are.


• Protection #2 "not liable for anything" Obviously if they go on a shooting rampage they are liable for that. This statement really doesn't matter because a court of law will ultimately decide what you are liable for. Basically, this says, "I wrote some code. It works for me. It might cause your computer to eat your soul."


• Protection #3 is really more instructional than anything else, but again tells derivative authors to keep their hands off.

When NOT To Use This License

You are a company

If you have a company you should probably have legal draw up their own license, but if you still want to use this license that is your choice.

Very little time/effort went into the project

If someone else can create your exact project in less than an hour your project is only worth licensing under the WTFPL. Anyone with rudimentary programming skills can probably recreate it. Unless your project is in the 1% exception use the WTFPL.

Your project is smaller than the license

Unless it's some sort of crazy exploit or the best algorithm ever your project should use the WTFPL.

How To Use This License

• Download the license.txt file


• Choose at least one of the following:
  • Add a notice in/on every item of the project being licensed.
  • Embed a copy of the license (it is pretty short) in/on every item of project being licensed.
  • Add a link to the license in/on every item in the project being licensed. (Hopefully you are using your own server. I have bandwidth limits too.)
  • In the case of images edit the license.txt by adding a blank line at the end then "Files:" then list all the files on every new line after that. The "Files:" step is UNNECESSARY for items such as code where one of the previous three options can be used.


• Distribute the license.txt file with your source work.