> "Copyright Bouke van der Bijl
I do not give anyone permissions to use this tool for any purpose. Don't use it.
I’m not interested in changing this license. Please don’t ask. "
Used by counter on GitHub is at 464. The way it's worded would imply that they are all violating the license? How can this be enforced for inconsequential small pet projects? Is this really something to worry about, particularly with what (seems to me) to be a sort-of spurious license?
Sure you can ignore him and wait for him to lawyer up and make your life miserable. Considering that IT specialists which have capacity to contribute to open source are typically not poor or have idealogical interests, I would not take the bets.
Respect the wishes of the people you take code from.
License checking is like code coverage. If you are a professional you take care of it.
Actually it does matter and you don't have to. In practice pet projects are basically never going to be sued, it's simply not worth it. As a side note, a lot of techy people struggle to separate the law as written with the law as practiced.
The ethics question is more interesting, but for something like this which is clearly satirical? No harm, no foul.
The contextual author does not care for sure. But generally it is an ethical problem like you said but also a practical one. Once you stack enough pet (or should I say lpad) projects together something bigger comes out. And the liability is hidden three layers down the dependency tree.
Yes. My read of the situation is not that it's a license that intends to stop people from using it, but rather that it's a license that selects for a specific target audience that doesn't care about copyrights or is anti-copyright.
In my opinion, that's a perfectly valid audience to select for, although a license that specifically prohibited any licensee from ever filing a lawsuit over a copyright claim or sending a DMCA takedown might be a funnier way to accomplish it.
I still wouldn’t use this code, because I don’t want to break the law. Being anti-copyright doesn’t mean you also need to be against due process.