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Stop. A file called "LICENSE" cannot be worth any of your heartbeats.
You do not need to read any further. At least I wish no one had to.
Take what you need and go on with your life.
If you are still reading, as far as I can imagine, there are two things
you might be thinking right now:
1. "Ugh, another crayon license. What's *this* moron's excuse anyway?"
2. "Ooh, another crayon license! I like those, they're usually funny."
I will try my best to entertain the second group, though I will spend
a few words attempting to appeal to the first one.
I honestly cannot bring myself to use any of the serious licenses out
there. I find that even the most permissive licenses contain clauses I
cannot imagine myself imposing on others, such as asking them to "retain
a copyright notice, a list of conditions, and a disclaimer" for any
snippet of code they may want to extract.
That leaves joke licenses such as WTFPL, DBAD, Nietzsche and GIYOL,
which as far as I understand are not worth squat in the situations where
licenses actually become relevant. So if I am going to carry around a
dysfunctional LICENSE file, I figure I might as well write it myself.
Let me then attempt to define the conditions under which you may use
and/or redistribute those things I wrote (hereinafter referred to as
THIS STUFF), so that we do not step on each other's toes.
TL;DR:
1. If any part of THIS STUFF can help you, use it as you see fit.
2. Do not hold me liable for any problem you get with THIS STUFF.
Before expanding on these points, allow me to sidetrack for a moment.
THIS STUFF is but a collection of characters spread across a few files,
which happen to compile, run, and on their good days, pass the dubious
tests some questionably lucid schmuck wrote. Fundamentally, there is
nothing more to it.
I have fond memories of our first dog. He was roughly the same age as I
was; I would have been 10 or 11 when he died. His last year was
punctuated with severe seizures: these episodes would always leave me
feeling powerless before, at best, our inexorable death, at worst, the
slow decline of our physical and mental health, until we become little
more than a pathetic load on the well-meaning souls who strive to keep
us alive.
Back to the license:
1. If any part of THIS STUFF can help you, use it as you see fit.
I cannot prevent my own decrepitude, let alone others'. What I believe
I can do, however, is give you complete freedom over what to do with
THIS STUFF.
I am not a lawyer, so there is little hope that I can figure out the
correct wording for what I want to convey, without leaving loopholes
here and there. I shall still try to express some of the things I mean
by "use it as you see fit":
- "it" refers to "any part of THIS STUFF". If some arbitrary chunk of
THIS STUFF may be useful to you, but you cannot be bothered with
dragging all the cruft along, by all means, just extract that chunk
and go on with your life. Specifically, do not search the files for
copyright or permission notices to "retain": there are none.
The thought of somebody having to copy-paste my name into their
project simply because they found an interesting one-liner in my code
feels profoundly wrong.
- Kids these days, with their edgy "see if I care" licenses, am I right?
The thing is, I do care! Sort of. Not that much, I guess? I mean at
least a bit. Which is the point of the "as you see fit" part: if you
care more than I do, I expressly grant you the right to take any part
of THIS STUFF and re-license it with a proper license.
2. Do not hold me liable for any problem you get with THIS STUFF.
I know my code. I remember the sight of a dog under seizure. I can
tell you that my dog could have written THIS STUFF while rolling over a
keyboard during one of his episodes.
I am providing THIS STUFF as-is and cannot claim any warranty
whatsoever, especially not of merchantability or fitness for a
particular purpose. I will not be held responsible for any damage THIS
STUFF may cause.
If you want to play with the shit that came out of some aging epileptic
dog on Prozac, you are on your own.
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