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Comment by jahewson | Hacker News Reader

Great. It's just a shame about the boneheaded "DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE". It makes you look like a complete idiot.

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It's really not worth licensing hassle for this amount of code.

It's really not worth dragging otherwise nifty code into the gutter with unnecessary obscenity.

"Public domain" would suffice. Yes, a significant percentage of the population does have a problem with needless obscenity.

In some jurisdictions it isn't possible for creators to disclaim all their rights. In those cases something like WTFPL (or, in a more tasteful manner, CC0) is necessary.

Which I suppose is why there's a 2:1 license-to-code ratio for this project.

Yes and even so it might not be legally valid. US copyright law is overly restrictive by default. It takes an effort to loosen it up a bit. c.f. Creative Commons project.

Wouldn't that be even more reason to just pick a license that doesn't ruffle feathers? BSD is nice. So is MIT. Says the same thing but doesn't get people to post "Why'd you pick that license?" posts.

It's an expression of frustration at how much effort has to go into understanding licensing. For this amount of code, no author or reader should have to consider the terms of a license. (And the license-to-code ratio would be even more ridiculous. )

No amount of code is too small, as the recent Oracle v. Google BS has shown. The rangeCheck method that was contested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3940683 (It made my day when the judge revealed he had former coding experience.) People shouldn't be worried about covering their ass for this stuff, but if they don't it could cost them. The WTFPL is also a frustration at that fact. As a bonus it eliminates the slight annoyance of people emailing/commenting and asking what the license is if one wasn't provided, at the cost of sensitive people complaining elsewhere about the profanity.

I've used a "version 3" (different version, different name!) of the WTFPL that I picked up from somewhere on a few of my projects, it has some additional legal garble that would probably beef it up just slightly if it was ever tested in court. https://github.com/Jach/lucid_demo/blob/master/COPYING

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