Please stop using WTFPL
Posted: Sun Aug 14, 2016 19:12I know it won't change anyone's minds, but you should really consider using something other than WTFPL when releasing your mods. I know the anti-authoritarian, laissez faire attitude of the license as well as the trendy use of a highly flexible superlative is appealing, but the license does not function as intended. There is a reason *every* distributed piece of software needs a license, and there's a reason for the stuffy, formal, and arcane verbiage used in these licenses. Licenses are not a vanity part of a project, they are a feature of the project meant to protect the safety of its authors, users, operators, and distributors. For this reason, we have to use great care in selecting a license, and in this article I will explain why the trendy WTFPL is a bad decision for everyone involved. Please just use MIT or something.
The "intent" of a license is to protect the person creating the software and the person receiving it or distributing it. Usually licenses do this by
1. Explicitly stating the rights a user has (or does not have) to modify/distribute the work
2. Explicitly stating the conditions under which distribution or modification may occur
3. Explicitly stating the warranty given (or not) to users of the software
Every major license, such as GPL, BSD, MIT will include all three of these parts, or explicitly state when they're not granted. That's because these parts are critical in the operation of the license, and missing any of the three renders a license either dangerous or unenforceable. WTFPL lacks all three.
Without #1, it is actually illegal to modify (or even use) the software in most western jurisdictions. Your license has to explicitly state that people have these rights, and in fact this is why all open source software must be released with a license to begin with. Without a license that has clauses to this effect, by default your implicit copyright specifically prevents people from doing this (in the US). The WTFPL appears to the laymen to have this, but in fact the undefinably broad phrasing and failure to enumerate explicit permissions granted means that users have no guarantee of this being represented in court. That means that to even download or modify the software requires them to risk intellectual property litigation on your part. Even if you are a Totally Chill Dude who would never do something like that, you legally could and that's a risk the user would have to assume.
If #1 is present (and weak) and #2 is not, the license is vulnerable to any number of loopholes. Presenting no restrictions whatsoever could allow malicious parties to distribute the work without noting your copyright, and to completely replace your given license with a license of their own choosing. While they couldn't take legal actions to enforce the copyright of the original work (and why would they?), they could potentially represent the work as being originally written by them, prevent distribution or modification of their own copies, and sell it for tons of profit.
#3 is probably the most tangibly significant to us here, as it's the only one that could cause actual real-world loss to a minetest mod author in a feasible scenario. #3 is so important that every major license INCLUDES IT IN ALL CAPS VERY SERIOUSLY AT A PROMINENT PART OF THE DOCUMENT. This is the no-warranty statement, and it could save you millions of dollars some day. Foreigners might not be aware, but the state of intellectual property, tort, and liability law in the US are all completely fucked. The past three decades have seen an unending stream of lawsuits awarding millions of dollars to (and from) massive corporations for dubious IP and liability claims that any normal person on the street intuitively knows are immoral, or at least unworthy of granting such massive sums. There is in fact entire industries of "patent trolls" and "ambulance chasers" who profit by abusing the lack of common sense in these systems, essentially exploiting poorly written legislation and contracts like a computer hacker exploits poorly written code, getting it to do something other than its originally intended task (which is to protect you).
This is in fact the very reason for the unintelligible, overly-precise verbiage found in modern licenses and contracts: any misstep in the composition of these documents can lead to massive real-world loss via exploitation in civil court. And this is why you definitely should not ever use WTFPL, and why I've spent an hour on a Sunday writing out this explanation. A license is like a piece of "code" that executes in a court of law to protect you and your users, and we should expect of it the same things we expect of other security software. It should be verifiably correct, meticulously written, and most importantly WELL TESTED.
Some parting thoughts on WTFPL:
WTFPL has never been tried in a western court of law
WTFPL is literally a joke: it was written as a satire of the GPL (1)
WTFPL does not grant explicit permissions or disclaim any warranty, failing the basic requirements of a license and leaving authors and users alike vulnerable to litigation
WTFPL is popularized by its flippant language and eschewing the overly-formal style of legal composition, rather than its effectiveness as a software license
WTFPL is "not recommended" by the FSF (2)
WTFPL was outright rejected by the OSI (3)
I know we're all just playing around with a hobbyist clone of a children's game on the weekends, but you can still get sued for it.
(1) http://programmers.stackexchange.com/qu ... 907_161949
(2) https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#WTFPL
(3) https://opensource.org/minutes20090304
The "intent" of a license is to protect the person creating the software and the person receiving it or distributing it. Usually licenses do this by
1. Explicitly stating the rights a user has (or does not have) to modify/distribute the work
2. Explicitly stating the conditions under which distribution or modification may occur
3. Explicitly stating the warranty given (or not) to users of the software
Every major license, such as GPL, BSD, MIT will include all three of these parts, or explicitly state when they're not granted. That's because these parts are critical in the operation of the license, and missing any of the three renders a license either dangerous or unenforceable. WTFPL lacks all three.
Without #1, it is actually illegal to modify (or even use) the software in most western jurisdictions. Your license has to explicitly state that people have these rights, and in fact this is why all open source software must be released with a license to begin with. Without a license that has clauses to this effect, by default your implicit copyright specifically prevents people from doing this (in the US). The WTFPL appears to the laymen to have this, but in fact the undefinably broad phrasing and failure to enumerate explicit permissions granted means that users have no guarantee of this being represented in court. That means that to even download or modify the software requires them to risk intellectual property litigation on your part. Even if you are a Totally Chill Dude who would never do something like that, you legally could and that's a risk the user would have to assume.
If #1 is present (and weak) and #2 is not, the license is vulnerable to any number of loopholes. Presenting no restrictions whatsoever could allow malicious parties to distribute the work without noting your copyright, and to completely replace your given license with a license of their own choosing. While they couldn't take legal actions to enforce the copyright of the original work (and why would they?), they could potentially represent the work as being originally written by them, prevent distribution or modification of their own copies, and sell it for tons of profit.
#3 is probably the most tangibly significant to us here, as it's the only one that could cause actual real-world loss to a minetest mod author in a feasible scenario. #3 is so important that every major license INCLUDES IT IN ALL CAPS VERY SERIOUSLY AT A PROMINENT PART OF THE DOCUMENT. This is the no-warranty statement, and it could save you millions of dollars some day. Foreigners might not be aware, but the state of intellectual property, tort, and liability law in the US are all completely fucked. The past three decades have seen an unending stream of lawsuits awarding millions of dollars to (and from) massive corporations for dubious IP and liability claims that any normal person on the street intuitively knows are immoral, or at least unworthy of granting such massive sums. There is in fact entire industries of "patent trolls" and "ambulance chasers" who profit by abusing the lack of common sense in these systems, essentially exploiting poorly written legislation and contracts like a computer hacker exploits poorly written code, getting it to do something other than its originally intended task (which is to protect you).
This is in fact the very reason for the unintelligible, overly-precise verbiage found in modern licenses and contracts: any misstep in the composition of these documents can lead to massive real-world loss via exploitation in civil court. And this is why you definitely should not ever use WTFPL, and why I've spent an hour on a Sunday writing out this explanation. A license is like a piece of "code" that executes in a court of law to protect you and your users, and we should expect of it the same things we expect of other security software. It should be verifiably correct, meticulously written, and most importantly WELL TESTED.
Some parting thoughts on WTFPL:
WTFPL has never been tried in a western court of law
WTFPL is literally a joke: it was written as a satire of the GPL (1)
WTFPL does not grant explicit permissions or disclaim any warranty, failing the basic requirements of a license and leaving authors and users alike vulnerable to litigation
WTFPL is popularized by its flippant language and eschewing the overly-formal style of legal composition, rather than its effectiveness as a software license
WTFPL is "not recommended" by the FSF (2)
WTFPL was outright rejected by the OSI (3)
I know we're all just playing around with a hobbyist clone of a children's game on the weekends, but you can still get sued for it.
(1) http://programmers.stackexchange.com/qu ... 907_161949
(2) https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#WTFPL
(3) https://opensource.org/minutes20090304