yuu0007 / wtfpl

WTFPL is currently at v3.1

WTFPL

Supposedly not a copyleft licence [0], but it's certainly the most libre in my book.

See rWTFPL for the maintained repo.

Version 1

do What The Fuck you want to Public License

Version 1.0, March 2000
Copyright (C) 2000 Banlu Kemiyatorn (]d).
136 Nives 7 Jangwattana 14 Laksi Bangkok
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

Ok, the purpose of this license is simple
and you just

DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.

Version 2

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

Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar <[email protected]>

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.

Version 3

Introducing WTFPL v3

2012-03-24

I’ve never licensed any of my projects, since they’re all free, opensource, and I wouldn’t really care if anyone used my projects and even sold them. A friend of mine asked me about licensing and I gave him that answer. Then, he introduced me to WTFPL.

I loved it, really. From all of the free software licenses, this was the only one I really felt free with, without thousands of unreadable clauses, causing people to not read (or respect) it anyway.

Even though, I felt there were two issues with WTFPL as it is:

Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar <[email protected]>

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.

A copyright warning on a license which completely frees software? From Wikipedia: Copyright is a legal concept, […], giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time. So, a license like that is owned by someone? Not even GNU copyrighted their own license. Now, what the hell is that second paragraph? It’s a license for completely freeing software, and then it locks itself into a clause which forbids you from changing it freely? I’ll admit it, it’s no big deal if we were talking about something like the GPL or BSD, but that paragraph goes completely against WTFPL’s philosophy as I get it. To solve these issues, simple adjustements were made: Replace the copyright warning by a simple by Sam Hocevar observation, and entirely remove the paragraph about changing the license, leaving it completely free. The result is here, to be placed on COPYING or LICENSE files of a project:

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
                    Version 3, March 2012

 by Sam Hocevar <[email protected]>
    theiostream <[email protected]>

            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.

Now, I figured it was time to solve another blank area left by WTFPL: A note to be inserted into a code’s comments to indicate a license, or in a README file. This is what I put together:

This project is licensed under the terms of the
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE, version 3,
as published by theiostream on March 2012, as it follows:

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

Thanks for reading this babbling around, even doubting anyone will ever use WTFPLv3.

Well, thanks to you, @theiostream, I've decided to go with the slightly modified WTFPLv3.1...

Version 3.1

• Change instances of license -> licence

My recommendation is to just do what the fuck you want to. Copy it, change 'em back to license, increase the version number, convert spaces to tabs, whatever dude.

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENCE
                    Version 3.1, July 2019

 by Sam Hocevar <[email protected]>
    theiostream <[email protected]>
    dtf         <[email protected]>

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

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

Put this somewhere in-code:

# This project is libre, and licenced under the terms of the
# DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENCE, version 3.1,
# as published by dtf on July 2019. See the COPYING file or
# https://ph.dtf.wtf/w/wtfpl/#version-3-1 for more details.

---

[0] - GNU Project - Various Licenses and Comments about Them

---

# This project is libre, and licenced under the terms of the
# DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENCE, version 3.1,
# as published by dtf on July 2019. See the COPYING file or
# https://ph.dtf.wtf/w/wtfpl/#version-3-1 for more details.