Re: Advice on licenses with "funny" amendments

[Walter Landry <w@wlandry.net>]

Hi Nik,

JSON has a license with similar problems.  It has the addendum

  The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

Debian takes the author at their word, and so it goes into non-free.

  https://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/jsonevil

I think that would have to be the case here as well.

Cheers,
Walter Landry

Dominik George writes:
> Hi,
>
> some times, we (the AlekSIS team) stumble upon upstream maintainers
> who consider it funny to add amendments to licenses, or make up fun
> licenses on their own. Here are two examples:
>
>   https://github.com/codeedu/select2-materialize
>
>   This project is MIT-licensed, but has a note saying:
>
>   "BUT if you become a millionaire using this code, please bought
>    me a new brand luxury sailboat."
>
> Probably meant as a joke, a lawyer might see that
> differently. Actually, I am somewhat curious if by adding this package
> to Debian, and with that forcing it into Ubuntu, we could see Mark
> Shuttleworth buy a luxury sailboat for that guy i nexchange for their
> 30 lines of CSS ;).
>
>   https://github.com/iconify/collections-json/issues/12
>
>   Not pointing directly to the project in question, but to this
>   elaborate thread on the issue.
>
>   License here: https://icons8.com/good-boy-license
>
>   "Please do whatever your mom would approve of. No tattoos,
>    No touching food with unwashed hands, No exchanging for drugs"
>
> Taken literally, that is a restriction on use, and as such non-free.
>
>
> Now, it seems that the intention of these upstreams is not to really
> prohibit use. In fact, for the second example, upstream provided a
> nexpress statement that they dual-license under MIT license as
> well. In the first case, I could not successfully contact the authors
> yet.
>
> What does debian-legal say? Could I package the first example for
> Debian, and trust that the amendment is a joke?
>
> Thanks,
> Nik