Ask a room of developers to name open-source licenses and you will probably hear the same handful: GPL, BSD, MIT, Apache. Maybe Mozilla. That short list hides a much larger mess. The GNU project keeps a page cataloguing nearly every open-source license in existence—open-source and commercial, software and documentation. There are so many that browsing the list is enough to make your eyes glaze over. Programmers have clearly been busy.
Trying to tell all those licenses apart is its own problem; choosing one is another. The chart below is not much help. It is a complicated, satirical diagram that exists mainly to vent about license proliferation.
The next chart is different. It is not a joke; it lays out a very simple path for choosing a popular open-source license.
And then there are the licenses that belong in the same category as bizarre programming languages. Two are worth calling out.
WTFPL
WTFPL stands for What The Fuck Public License. The name alone is memorable. The license itself is remarkably short and grants total freedom:
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, December 2004
Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar <[email protected]>
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
as the name is changed.
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.
The final line is the entire attitude of the license: blunt, forceful, and oddly satisfying, like a line from an action movie. It does not stop you from keeping control of the copyright, and it does not stop you from giving it away. Would you trust your own open-source project to a license like that?
DBAD
DBAD stands for Don't Be A Dick. The license actually defines the term:
A person who does not respect the time and energy that have been invested in the Project, ……. A Dick is nearly always selfish, but not necessarily with deliberate intent; some Dicks are merely thoughtless. ……
In other words, the person who screws around in the project. What makes this license unusual is that it does not restrict the software's copyright; it restricts the behavior of the people developing the software. Its Section 4, Limitation, is where that idea gets its teeth.