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[Help-librejs] Add WTFPL to free licenses


From: CY
Subject: [Help-librejs] Add WTFPL to free licenses
Date: Fri, 05 Jun 2015 11:00:33 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.7.0

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I want to request that you add the WTFPL to your list of accepted free licenses.
It turns out that there are a number of very vocal people protesting the global
use of "public domain" which has historically been limited to colonizing nations
and not allowed of the colonies. The notion of "commonwealth" only applies to
the people who participate in the commons after all, and it's often conveniently
omitted that certain people are barred from participating in the commons. These
days we call them illegal immigrants. In fact, there are some who claim that the
commonwealth does not apply to any nation of citizens who do not recognize the
british monarch as their ruler!

Furthermore with copyright the way it is in the USA, someone can be barred from
releasing their work into public domain until 70 years after they have died, or
120 years if they have allowed a corporation to use it. Granted if you don't die
first, and never ever work with other people (a "corporation") then you can
release it, but it does leave a bad taste on many people's mouths at the mere
mention of "public domain" and "freedom" in the same sentence.

A lot of people who wanted to do the hell away with licensing and be totally
permissive, released under public domain, only to find that there are STILL
people in the world who will go after others for using that stuff. It's
vanishingly rare in respect to software, because immigrants only count as
illegal if they're too poor to qualify for legality, and poor people don't have
much in terms of time or computers. But it is something people Have Opinions
about. One such person created what is called the WTFPL, (the "Do What The Fuck
You Want To Public License") and it pretty much means what it says on the tin.

http://www.wtfpl.net/about/

It's pretty much undeniably a free software license. You might want to rename it
to the "Do What The Freedom You Want To Public License" or something to avoid
offending people, which is allowed by the license, (albeit argued against by the
author), but regardless it would be nice to be able to use it, for the odd times
we want to publish a semi-trivial piece of Javascript without also stomping on
the graves of all the injuns who were murdered by the commonwealth. Or 
something.

If nothing else, the WTFPL has a lot simpler and less ambiguous wording than any
other public domain license I've run across. Especially the CC0.

The following is the full text of the WTFPL:

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
                    Version 2, December 2004

 Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar <address@hidden>

 Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
 copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
 as the name is changed.

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
   TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

  0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.

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