Legal Commentary

Funniest Software License Ever?

By Michael Froomkin

There have been funny terms of service and software licenses in the past, like the TOS that demanded your first-born son, and the one that offered $10,000 to the first person to read it and get in touch, but I think this, via BoingBoing might be my favorite:

Voynix recently wrote something he calls The Spite License. They say it is, “in essence, a trapdoor ? it allows potential licensees to use the software under the terms of the secondary license (as shown here, the standard MIT license) if and only if they do not read the license file itself.”

Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT HOLDER>

Permission is hereby granted to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated materials to make use of the software and associated materials according to the terms of the MIT License (see included file `LICENSE_MIT`) IF AND ONLY IF they have not read any portion of this file.

Any person who has read any portion of this file may not make any use of the software and associated materials for any purpose whatsoever. Any permissions previously granted to any person to use this software and associated materials terminate and are revoked with immediate effect upon their reading of any portion of this file.

Why did they create this? Voynix offers two reasons:

• Because it’s funny
• Because you want randos on the Internet but not big companies with lawyers who make their engineers actually read licenses to use your software

The post Funniest Software License Ever? appeared first on Discourse.net.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on September 28, 2020 (boomark / email).