Most of the articles on this blog are marked CC-BY-4.0 in the YAML front matter, but I would like to make it known visibly, here, that this article is licensed under CC BY 4.0, written by yours truly (“multiplealiases”).

It’d be some irony to rail against copyright and have this work be unmarked (thus All Rights Reserved), wouldn’t it? I’d put it in the public domain (or equivalent), but I like being cited.

So, this license. I think it sucks. I think it’s wrong. I will quote it in full, because I don’t think it’s worth putting the project I got this from on blast, but it is worth keeping around a full, unedited copy in case all other copies end up deleted.

“i’m so tired” software license 1.0

copyright (c) [year] [authors]

this is anti-capitalist, anti-bigotry software, made by people who are tired of ill-intended organisations and individuals, and would rather not have those around their creations.

permission is granted, free of charge, to any user (be they a person or an organisation) obtaining a copy of this software, to use it for personal, commercial, or educational purposes, subject to the following conditions:

  1. the above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or modified versions of this software.

  2. the user is one of the following: a. an individual person, labouring for themselves b. a non-profit organisation c. an educational institution d. an organization that seeks shared profit for all of its members, and allows non-members to set the cost of their labor

  3. if the user is an organization with owners, then all owners are workers and all workers are owners with equal equity and/or equal vote.

  4. if the user is an organization, then the user is not law enforcement or military, or working for or under either.

  5. the user does not use the software for ill-intentioned reasons, as determined by the authors of the software. said reasons include but are not limited to: a. bigotry, including but not limited to racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, sexism, antisemitism, religious intolerance b. pedophilia, zoophilia, and/or incest c. support for cops and/or the military d. any blockchain-related technology, including but not limited to cryptocurrencies

  6. the user does not promote or engage with any of the activities listed in the previous item, and is not affiliated with any group that promotes or engages with any of such activities.

this software is provided as is, without any warranty or condition. in no event shall the authors be liable to anyone for any damages related to this software or this license, under any kind of legal claim.

The hell is this? Okay, let me break it down:

It’s cowardly

Before I talk into the wider problem, let me say something about the moral position this license takes. It specifically wants to shut out Bad People™, but it’s also downright cowardly. I think a reality of living in a society is that, eventually, what you do will end up ultimately, indirectly contributing to evil. It wouldn’t take a prophet to say that NumPy is probably used by militaries for calculations that will probably be used to murder people.

I don’t like this state of affairs, I really don’t, but don’t you also go outside in daylight, knowing that it increases your risk of cancer? It’s about risk management; the Bad Thing may happen, but isn’t it worth it to have done the risky thing? Don’t you want to do some good? Hell, it’s not like NumPy is made to kill; they’ve made a conveyor belt which happens to be used by someone else to make guns. You didn’t set out to hurt people, so why act like you are?

Either you will have done some good and a tiny amount of bad, or you will have done no good and no bad. This license deprives others from doing good with your work, because you’re too scared of the comparatively tiny amount of bad that could be done with it. It’s not a productive way to think about the problem.

I think if you really want to stop evil, speak out against evil. Donate time, money and other resources to causes against evil. Do something, don’t let this moral purity ritual paralyze you.

FOSS licenses are a difficult compromise.

What I think I’ve understood about Free Software is that it’s a legal shim. All this is for is to use the copyright system against itself; use a system that alienates fellow artists (in the broadest sense) from each other, to bring us together. It’s so we can re-use each other’s stuff without fearing someone suing us down the line.

The thing is, whenever we use tools of oppression like this, we need to be intensely mindful of what our system intends to achieve. I don’t think this license does what it intends to do. I think it, instead, is the equivalent of posting armed guards around your house in response to a bulglary. This license is actively telling people (including your neighbors) that you care more about “protection” than about collaboration.

Oh, and the FSF are clowns.

Don’t tell me that the FSF does good work when they tell everyone they should be using the GPL. I don’t want to hear it. They’re just going “uhm, acktually” at the problem here. Again, free licensing is a legal shim. If you do not remember this crucial detail, you get dick-twisters like the one described in the FSF’s relationship with firmware is harmful to free software users.

See, I’m still not too sure what causes are worthy, but I do know something: I don’t think the FSF are promoting a worthy cause. They’ve quite infamously allowed Richard M. Stallman to stay, after all, and he’s… a troubling man. I dunno, like, we could balance this against the notion of a culture that perhaps might be zealots about performing (but not necessarily doing) accountability, but he’s also had decades to walk it back.

Even ignoring the may-as-well-be leader of the movement’s sex-pestilence, I also don’t think they’re very interested in any sort of compromise with their Free Software ideals. I mean, look at how they think of firmware, a thing that you need to make your computer work. They don’t want you to just try out some Free Software, they don’t want your stuff to be 99% Free or 1% Free, these people want you to be exactly 100% Free and no less.

I’m sorry to say. I think you sound like a pencil-necked, squeaky-voiced, “uhm, acktually” nerd when you think like this. I’m not perfect, I have been guilty of having such worms in my brain, but you gotta do better than this. Don’t be a door-to-door Mormon.

FOSS licenses are social contracts, too.

You ever see a promising codebase, but they (likely some commercial entity, but the Minecraft community has enough of these that they’re called “crayon licenses”) put it under a “custom” license? Have you ever been told “nah, it’s not worth it until you get a lawyer to review it”? Well, what you’ve experienced is licensing-as-social-contract.

Licenses exist to cover our asses from others. If you don’t use a standard license, we don’t know on what terms the code can be used on, because we’d have to hire a lawyer at tremendous expense. While, yes, there are numerous quibbles related to the ‘famous’ licenses, they’re also less useful to express, because it’s 99% just a social game. If someone sues and the MIT license ends up invalid, thus reverting to All Rights Reserved, everyone’s done for.

Using this license is building a moat around your work… especially around potential contributors.

Don’t we like remix culture?

I’m not a very good or talented or creative creative, but isn’t transformation generally a thing we like? You get wonderful things like fanfic and game mods and entire genres of music. Since I Left You, a plunderphonics album that is entirely samples, is a shell of its former self in the international “we couldn’t get all the samples cleared” release.

What are we doing here? We’ve enforced a system where, at the whim of copyright holders, your work that is unrecognizable as any of its constituent samples, can be gutted and cleaned out for infringing material. It doesn’t matter what the context is, and you better pay up, pirate.

What are we doing here? We’re fencing off our artistic work, our world, from each other. We don’t trust each other no more because we think we’re all out to jack each other’s shit, so we arm and defend ourselves with copyright. Someone robs a store and, I guess, we’re all content with the idea that the socially-responsible response is to have bear traps and tripwire-activated flamethrowers lying about. We don’t want them to merely stop what they’re doing, we want them to suffer.

Does this license think it only affects the named Bad People™?

What are we doing here?

I feel when some people are given the Berne Convention-given right to bludgeon others over the head with copyright, they do exactly that. They’re literally millionaires, they have more money than most of us will ever get to see– but these chucklefucks will still feel like their work needs to be “protected”.

I vehemently disagree with this stance. This is landlord shit. Stop doing this. Stop allowing it. Stop selling artists on this.

More to the point, I believe that these two things, “copyright” and “making a decent living” are orthogonal. They ain’t related. Do you think that plagiarists care about the licensing of the work they so gleefully steal and make extravagant livings off? Hell no! And what recourse, exactly, is this prototypical starving artist supposed to have? Copyright lawsuits cost tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, to persue.

Only the rich and powerful get to enforce copyright protection. Tell me with a straight face: is this what’s meant to “protect” us? This violence against the social and creative fabric?

I’m told that publishers tend to be the ones pursuing suits. I believe those people are unserious; only going through the motions of what it means to “do business” because “doing business” means they need to “protect” their golden geese. They’d sooner stick a knife in the creative fabric than just let someone (very often someone much smaller than them) be.

When Drug Dealer Simulator’s publisher (I must clarify, because some people think it was the devs) went after Schedule I for potential infringement, people rightfully went “how money-hungry are you to go after an indie dev?”. They will forever now be tagged with that reputation. People don’t like you when you pursue copyright litigation.

How rich do you intend on being, traitor?