FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

I work at a school with kids K-8th and I would really love having them browse these forums and gits and try out new mods especially over our summer camp and at home but the WTFPL makes it so that I can't even suggest them doing it. As an alternative I have created this license that I hope people will use. I'm not a legal expert but I will be asking what lawyer friends I know how the language needs to improve if at all. This is of course based on the WTFPL text. Let me know what you think!



EDIT - Creative Commons Zero aka CC0 is a great license to use as well and is essentially the same as WTF but way more respected.

Seems fine to me.

Other alternatives would be MIT, Zlib, CC0, or ISC.

I like those licenses too! If no one uses my license but uses one of them that's fine with me, just a bit less of the WTF language would help a ton. Also I'd like to understand more what is bad about public domain because my understanding is that people were saying that the license can vary what it means per country. Very interesting indeed.

That's about it, the meaning of "Public Domain" and whether or not its allowed varies per state/country (some places don't allow it at all).

So it's best to simply place your code under WTFPL/CC0 style licenses instead, as they will be far more legal than saying "Public Domain".

I do not know in which reality you live thinking that 8th olds does not known these bad words. You seems wasting your energy on trivial problems.

If you want some content control and also save time for kids - create subgame with predefined mods which you think is worth/fun or appropriate to try. You can easily re-license WTFPL mods in you subgame into MIT or other license.

Part 1 - Whether the kids know the words or not makes zero difference. It is a school setting and there are rules. That is the reality I must abide by.

Part 2 - I have already done that and guess what I've changed the license to? But the more that use this license over WTF or any other license vs WTF is a lot less work for me and other educators and it enables me to let the kids browse a lot more of the minetest gits. For the no work of using this license for the creator over WTF, it saves a lot of hassle.

I think TheReaperKing is absolutely correct and I have run into similar problems with public educational institutions that have difficulties with that license. Just think of automatic filters that try to keep porn of the school computers by scaning for certain words.

It's ok for children to know such words exist in my opinion but they shouldn't be taught that swear words are perfect for legal texts. Have you ever tried to translate that license to another language? This exact expression doesn't exist in every language and you have to come up with some similar strong vulgare idiom that when translated word for word back into english may get you into other trouble.

One reason legal text sometimes sounds so strange is that it must be absolutely clear in it's meaning and in today's globalized world relative easy and safe to translate.

I can understand the appeal of the WTFPL license for certain age groups and set of minds but that doesn't mean that it is good functional legal language that works well. In fact one of the basic purposes of this license is to mock legal wording and maybe even express disgust for the necessity to having to add some legal text at all.

I used to packager for a particular Linux distro about ten years ago. When testing a very cute kids game, the welcome screen proudly displayed the WTFPL license and the full text immediately on load. I had a problem with this. I know it's my choice to decide what my children see and don't see. I can choose not to allow them to play. I can also choose to edit the sources to not show the license like a billboard, but not everyone has that ability. I ended up refusing to package the game.

Don't get me wrong. I can appreciate the humor in the license. I've even used the license myself. I'm not proud of it, but my kids know the words. They even have heard me utter or even yell them a time or two when I'm frustrated about things. But I don't use those words when conversing with them, and would never intentionally put those words in front of them and be able to justify it.

So I support TheReaperKing fully. I have young children in school. And it comforts me that teachers are watching out for them.

Oh my god, it says "fuck" in an acronym. That's truly obnoxious, indeed...



FWIW, I'm not going to use your license. I don't give a single shit about the political correctness, for most of devs only good code matters.

I agree and I will change my licence over to DWYWPL.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh2sWSVRrmo

jp I get it. I really do. And you have the right to be disgusted. I don't use the term "political correctness" loosely as you do. Political Correctness has nothing to do with it. It's my choices as a parent that set my standards. And as a parent guilty of being selfish and irresponsible in the past before I had my own children. I'm willing to be considerate of others that are concerned about what their children may be exposed to unnecessarily.

ExeterDad wrote:jp I get it. I really do. And you have the right to be disgusted. I don't use the term "political correctness" loosely as you do. Political Correctness has nothing to do with it. It's my choices as a parent that set my standards. And as a parent guilty of being selfish and irresponsible in the past before I had my own children. I'm willing to be considerate of others that are concerned about what their children may be exposed to unnecessarily.

I also see it as making Minetest available to more people. If the licence is making it so people and schools will not use a mod then it seems that a change is needed. It is a simple change and will allow more people to use that mods.

By the way, WTFPL allows literally anything, even re-licensing on your own if you find the wording unacceptable.

Nice idea for WTFPL users, but as a copyleft license user (a fan of GPL and CC-BY-SA-NC) it definitely isn't for me. Those who use the WTFPL should definitely relicense, because the DWYWPL doesn't really change the wording. In the end it is:
1. All rights granted
2. No guarantee of warranty
3. end

...

i don't know i will use WTFPL when i need it!

...

gunvolt wrote:Nice idea for WTFPL users, but as a copyleft license user (a fan of GPL and CC-BY-SA-NC)

NC is not an open source license, let alone copy left.

Note commercial != proprietary

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html

It is a matter of morals, to me.
As a father of two children, I have always had a serious issue with the rapid decay of morals across society.
I am strongly against PC because all it seems to do is to be a way to excuse those with low morals for their behavior.
I like this new license and the more moral wording.
It is never a bad thing to be courteous, considerate of the innocence of youth, it is even respectful.
In America, I have witnessed a steady decline of morals, and all this PC crap, where now what used to be unacceptable behavior in society has become acceptable and to speak against it is now the "wrong".
Everything is in reverse. So I applaud anyone who has good morals doing something to make changes which exhibit respect, courtesy, and consideration for others.
Morals have steadily decline simply because it is the easier way to go, than to put effort into being "better than", as well as dealing with the criticism and attacks from others with lesser morals with the common "oh, so you think you're better than me?!"
My response has always been "No, I don't think I am better than you..., I know I am better than you.
Anyway, this is why I only have a couple of very close friends in life, because I definitely do not "blend" with today's society. But my life is richer for it .
And as you can see in my signature, I am also a hypocrite :D

jp I really appreciate your opinion and I myself am not interested in the crazy political correctness of today, but I think your unhappiness with the DWYWPL is misplaced. It is not up to me whether or not swear words can be used or even viewed at school, it cannot be. If you dislike political correctness then your anger/annoyance or however you feel should be directed at those who impose those silly restrictions on the rest of us, not myself or the DWYWPL. I personally don't think using swear words at school or with children is necessary and would avoid it, but as far as political correctness in general I would agree that it has gone way overboard. In this case though I have no choice, it is not up to me.

And the WTFPL isn't only viewed as an acronym, many of the license users have it spelled out in their mod gits. I am definitely not saying that the DWYWPL is the best license to use either, nor am I trying to get people to use it over a non WTFPL. The entire intent is simply as a WTFPL alternative that can make the work accessible to more people aka kids and specifically kids at school. I did also add a clause about no warranty which I think is super important. Without that WTFPL users could potentially be liable for damages their software creates, I believe at least and is pointed out in the wikipedia entry. It is a very interesting read actually:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

I hope that all makes sense and for myself I would probably never use DWYWPL, I would use either zlib, or LGPL or maybe GPL3. I do like being credited though so that's my reason :) Take care and thanks everyone for your great insight!
-Mike

rubenwardy wrote:

gunvolt wrote:Nice idea for WTFPL users, but as a copyleft license user (a fan of GPL and CC-BY-SA-NC)

NC is not an open source license, let alone copy left.

Note commercial != proprietary

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html

I don't really use it for software, just for art. I guess instead of copyleft it could be called a share-alike license(cause CC calls them that)
I know that commercial is not proprietary, they have very different definitions.
But you are right, it is technically not a FLOSS license and I have no plans on using it for software (or software documentation for that matter)

To me it is simple. It does not matter what I think of swear words. If a simple change means the mods will be used by more people then I will do the simple change.
Growth of the community is more important then 5 letters.

Don that is completely the point of my creating the new license, thank you for understanding :)

I changed all my mods which were WTFPL to CC0.

Ruben that works too and thank you! Coincidentally I have been working with your CTF Mod to make it kid friendly so that they can have water balloon battles haha.

And how are the physics?

that a bit hard, better do paintball!

I agree that WTFPL was a better idea a few years ago when Mine* was more of a college kid thing rather than a family thing.

However, it's practically impossible to switch every piece of content away from that license, and regardless of that, going around changing licenses is not something I consider respectful towards the people who have originally made stuff under said license. Even then, that license is not the only place around here containing such language.

The good thing is, the nature of WTFPL is such that if you want to use something licensed under it for teaching or whatnot, you can legally just strip away the license, replacing it with nothing or absolutely anything you desire.

For those who want to switch away from WTFPL, I strongly suggest CC0. Its intention is the same, but it has more legalese to cover everyone's asses if things go really bad.

If there is need for a "kid-correct" english forum, maybe I or somebody else could host one. I'm a bit doubtful about whether enough content would be posted on it, and very doubtful about whether there's enough manpower for moderating it. It could work if some of these teachers want to take up the task. If people are interested, either post in this thread or PM me so that I can try to estimate the chances of success for such a thing.

I am working on a kid friendly version of minetest which is essentially going to be several subgames bundled together over at http://SandboxGameMaker.com I do have forums there which are kid friendly though I need to organize them better since I have it set up now for two software products. I do also own http://makeagamefree.com which I was thinking of using to host the edu version of minetest since I have been debating if my site is too cluttered with the other software already offered there and any insight would be extremely welcomed. I feel like this is something we could definitely work together on and I'm definitely not trying to make things more complicated but I think minetest has fantastic potential to help get kids into game design and learning coding in addition to being a great and easy to use creative outlet aka my original vision for Sandbox posted on the site.

I have zero problem changing the WTF licenses with mods I use and I definitely don't expect all WTF licenses to be changed over. The main thing is new mods can make the change if they'd like and then we can browse the repos at school. Repos that still use WTF I just won't have them look at. I have zero problem with people using CC0 over my license and perhaps that is what I should have suggested from the get go. I was initially thinking that rewording it so that it basically says the same thing but uses friendlier language would be an easy and painless switch for people interested.

Thanks so much for your insight. Take care!
-Mike

They're just 5 letters,
How about removing the "fuck"s from source code?
https://github.com/minetest/minetest/bl ... p.cpp#L221
https://github.com/minetest/minetest/bl ... e.cpp#L735

celeron55 wrote:I agree that WTFPL was a better idea a few years ago when Mine* was more of a college kid thing rather than a family thing.

However, it's practically impossible to switch every piece of content away from that license, and regardless of that, going around changing licenses is not something I consider respectful towards the people who have originally made stuff under said license. Even then, that license is not the only place around here containing such language.

The good thing is, the nature of WTFPL is such that if you want to use something licensed under it for teaching or whatnot, you can legally just strip away the license, replacing it with nothing or absolutely anything you desire.

For those who want to switch away from WTFPL, I strongly suggest CC0. Its intention is the same, but it has more legalese to cover everyone's asses if things go really bad.

If there is need for a "kid-correct" english forum, maybe I or somebody else could host one. I'm a bit doubtful about whether enough content would be posted on it, and very doubtful about whether there's enough manpower for moderating it. It could work if some of these teachers want to take up the task. If people are interested, either post in this thread or PM me so that I can try to estimate the chances of success for such a thing.

Great idea. I agree that cc0 is a better pseudo-PD license.
Maybe you could just try to create a automatic nsfw filter, too.

Oh, come on, this is fucking bullshit. Don't you have more serious problems than license names?

Nothing is wrong with the word “fuck”. In fact, is is quite useful. Citing Wikipedia: “Fuck has a very flexible role in English grammar, including use as both a transitive and intransitive verb, and as an adjective, adverb, and noun.[14] It can also be used as an interjection and a grammatical ejaculation. Linguist Geoffrey Hughes found eight distinct usages for English curse words, and fuck can apply to each.”. Removing this word from English would be fucking insane. (See what I did there?)

Also, I think we already have a huge mess of licenses, adding one more just adds to the confusion. You're not helping. :-( You are making things worse. And I find the acronym DWYWPL really hard to remember, WTFPL is much easier because of the “WTF” part in it. WTF is also a common part of chat slang for “What The Fuck”. Maybe it's because of the name because this license is pretty popular. :)
Also that DWhateverIForgotTheName license is redundant. As celeron55 has suggested, if you really want to cling on your crazy delusion that the word “fuck” must be removed from the language, you can just use any other of the “Public Domain” licenses like CC0.

DWWYWYWWWXVPL (that's what it's called, right?) is completely unknown, hard to remember and completely redundant to WTFPL. I rather stick with WTFPL then. I basically chose WTFPL because I do not want to trample on the freedom of others and it is very easy to understand, without all that legalese. I'd rather would use no license at all
because I think everyone should be free to share and adapt data at will, but this is not allowed in the broken copyright systems of the world, everything needs a permission. :-( But this is a different topic.

And I do not think we should submit to the demands of those who like to police language. To those we should rather say: “Get fucking used to it!”

I work at a school with kids K-8th and I would really love having them browse these forums and gits and try out new mods especially over our summer camp and at home but the WTFPL makes it so that I can't even suggest them doing it.

I think this distills the whole “problem” here: If you have a problem that kids will be exposed to supposedly “bad language” in the Internet, then you don't really want them to get to the Internet in the first place. If you are afraid the kids will become “bad” because someone said the word “fuck” in the Internet somewhere, then you are a dangeours lunatic who should not be allowed near kids. There is no safe way to express this.

Wuzzy, the issue is not about whether or not we agree with the word. It is about schools, churches, daycares and many other places having rules that prohibit the use. Most parents do not let their little kids swear. By excluding swear words we could potentially open up to a bigger market.

I am all for free speech. If you want to swear then that is up to you. If you want to have a mod called fuck then go ahead. The change in licence is a suggestion and meant to allow mods in more places.