On December 19, 2015 11:02:47 AM EST, Mark Holmquist <mtraceur@member.fsf.org> wrote:
On 12/18/2015 08:32 PM, Julien Kyou wrote:
[0]meaning only this document not the licensed materials?
Yes, the first "Do WTF you want" clause is about the license, not the
works being licensed under it. That means the license is also
modifiable
and adaptable.
[1]so basically closing the source is ok?
I was not really
asking this, so much as pointing it out
Yes - this is the biggest difference between a copyleft license and a
permissive license, and it's nothing new, and there's nothing wrong
with
it necessarily. I'd argue that the community of programmers often
doesn't pull source code into secret, but if they absolutely need to,
they have that freedom.
I have seen this happen a few times in the past
(I realize it was a rhetorical question, but since it's also a
contention that allowing downstream to close the source is
*necessarily*
an issue, I answered it anyway)
Absolutely, I agree 'permissive-non-copyleft' has a place but for
most
things I'd sooner just slap a GPL on and be done
The GPL, for all the good it does in the world, is a more complex
license to administer and enforce. You must include license headers in
all of the files in your project, for example, which may not be a
viable
option for some, or may be a step that others ignore.
To enforce the GPL, especially the parts about including a GPL'd
library
in a compiled binary of a larger project, requires a lot of sleuthing,
or to simply rely on the goodwill of other programmers. The latter
solution usually works pretty well, but if the Free Software movement
asserts that non-free software is unethical, surely they're capable of
ignoring license terms.
And, if you're working on a project that *is* non-free, but
you want to
release a library that you wrote for it as free software, you can
release it under a permissive license (though admittedly, a company
probably wouldn't want the WTFPL exactly, though it is modifiable, so
they could transform it to say "You just DO WHATEVER YOU WANT TO.")
with
relative ease, and avoid a lot of overhead of making sure you're
complying with every single provision of the GPL or whatever other
document you had discovered.
I guess I'm just adding examples to your statement that permissive
licenses "ha[ve] a place", but I felt it would be useful. I often fear
this mailing list is getting a little tone-deaf.
Anyways, I just don't like seeing open-source being abused. So when I
learnt of this zero clause license, I felt sick.
How is
this an abuse of open-source? It's a valid open source license.
It isn't. The idiot who made may be hurting both movements though.