2005-07-23 06:59:21

Libertarian Shareware License

This document is divided into two parts, and only the first one is a license in a traditional sense. The second part contains some information about the author's intent, but it shouldn't be regarded as an obligation or contract or even an offer.

1. Legal conditions

Since the authors of this program don't rely on any government authority or any form of software copyright law to 'protect' them,

We hereby disclaim all exclusive author's rights that were assigned to us by any copyright laws in any coutry,

So any person that has a copy of this program may legally use it as if it were a public domain software.

This software may contain third-party components which are copyrighted with a MIT/X11 or BSD-style licenses. We won't accept any responsibility for your treatment of their authors and their code.

This software is provided as is, in hope that it will be useful but without any warranty.

2. Author's intent

We are releasing software under this license terms in hope that some users will exercise their rational thinking abilities, and decide that it's nice to treat this program in an author-friendly way, not for legal or moral obligation, but for getting friendly treatment in exchange.

With regard to this program, author-friendly things include the following:

Sharing the program's registration key with your friends, family, colleagues etc.
Adapting this program to your environment, even if it requires 'cracking' the program.
Developing a new program based on this one, clearly stating that it's not original program.
Reusing the program's source code as part of your own work, which is not just the clone of the original program.
The most author-friendly thing you can do is, of course, registering the program.

The author-unfriendly things include the following:

Sharing the program's registration key to unrestricted audience.
Claiming that you've wrote this program, not me.

Why may you want to act author-friendly? Well, as the author, I'm going to discriminate users acting unfriendly. I may blacklist the published serial numbers in any new versions; I may also refuse to provide technical support for such users. And, of course, if you have done something, I have a right and an ability to claim that you've done this thing. The right to tell the truth.

E.g. if you will publicly claim that you wrote this software, I'm going to claim that you have not. Hopefully, the truth will be obvious for any objective third-party.

On the other side, I'm going to respect the author-friendly users and be nice to them. They may even be surprised by our support quality and the speed of adding requested features to the program.

So it may be rational for you to obey the author-friendliness rules. Moral aspect of doing or not doing so are entirely up to you – I don't have any control on the morality of others, and I don't even want to have it. As of the legal aspects, see part 1 and don't worry about it.

Anton Kovalenko,
Sw4me.com Programmers Group

'Free software' vs. 'Open source' classification

It's unlikely that this software may be classified as 'free' in the sense of Richard Stallman and FSF. It may be so, however, but this question is out of interest for me.

The advantages that you and we are getting with this licensing scheme

On the user's side, they're obvious. You don't have to look through some pages of legalese to just know what you can do and what you can't. Almost anything that you do with our software is legal, and most things are author-friendly. Violations of the simple rules that constitutes the latter cannot result in lawsuits (though may be bad for reputation); there will be just some benefits that you will lose.

On the our side, we could write only the first half of the document in a style of legal statement; the second half is written to be perceived by the rational people, not lawers. It saved much trouble that our mind could suffer in other case.

On the abstract side, this is just the way Shareware really works. It's profitable to be a realist.

The text of this page itself is public domain.

2005-07-23 06:57:34

edited by AntonKovalenko

2005-07-23 06:57:05