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Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

I find it funny that this apparently meets the Wikipedia notability standards.

Anyway, I always found it strange that anyone would choose to use this license. The concept behind it is great, but why include unnecessary profanity in the license terms? It seems like it would only make it more difficult to defend the validity of the license and any works released under the license.

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It seems to me that you would use this license if you specifically intend to spit in the eye of copyright laws in general. The use of this license burns quite a few bridges even without the profanity, but the profanity makes it a political statement in addition to a legal document.

It's notable because there's a reasonable amount of software released under it, including, for example, some software in Debian's repositories.

What would you need to defend?

Scenario: Alice writes a program, puts it under that licence, Bob uses the program, Alice dies and her heir Eve wants to get money from Bob for using the software. Eve tries to get a court to declare the licence invalid, so that Bob has to re-licence the program under new conditions or stop using it.

Assuming that it's possible at all to declare the WTFPL invalid (why would it be?) - he can re-licence the program to a licence giving everyone exactly the same rights. It is allowed by WTFPL.

Bob is not the copyright owner. He can't re-licence it to anything.

What he can do is re-license a right to use the program, under terms specified by the copyright owner.

I've attached extra meaning to c vs s in the word licence, but the definition you used is not the same as parent.

Yes. And if the new copyright owner Eve declares the original license invalid, Bob won't be able to re-licence (or even use the program any longer). Also Alice and Eve could be the same person who just changed her mind.

I don't think that's true. Eve can change the licence on her work. That doesn't affect any copy that Bob obtained beforehand. You cannot change the licence in a way that affects things already released - otherwise you'd be able to release something under BSD and after a year say "I'm changing the terms, new licence requires everyone to pay me X, even if you obtained the software on BSD terms".

Referring to the WTFPL author (http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/):

    Can’t you change the wording? It’s inappropriate / childish /
    not corporate-compliant.
    
    What the fuck is not clear in “DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU
    WANT TO”? If you do not like the license terms, just
    relicense the work under another license.

Yes, you can't normally do this --- as long as the license is valid. That's why you may need to defend it in court. (Eve may want the court to decide that the license never gave the right in the first place.)

Eve could do that, for sure. Nothing in the license forbids it. Declaring the license invalid and requiring users to re-license it does fall under 'what the fuck you want to' according to my interpretation of the license. But then again, I believe so does 'doing what the fuck I want to', so there's that too...

If I'm not mistaken, the GPL has had to be defended in court several times. It's a situation where someone tries to charge money for a product, but a GPL'd source code was used in the product. That particular situation doesn't apply to this license however, since you can, apparently, do whatever you want.

The GPL has nothing to do with "charging money", so no, that's never been tested in court. And in any case, in a suit regarding any distribution license, it is the copyright owner who would bring the suit, forcing the alleged infringer to "defend" the case.

Sorry - I was indeed mistaken about the "charging money" aspect of it. However, the GPL has been successfully defended in court:

http://gpl-violations.org/news/20060922-dlink-judgement_fran...

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