Treat gus with beer! Or about the license Beerware

St. Patrick's Day is already over, the day of laughter is already on the nose, so it was important for me not to miss this favorable time for the preparation of this particular material. And he about the following. Anyone who had to work with FMDB and get acquainted with its license , had the opportunity to see the following text in it:

If you are using FMDB in your project, I'd love to hear about it. Let Gus know by sending an email to gus@flyingmeat.com. And if you happen to come across either Gus Mueller or Rob Ryan in a bar, you might consider purchasing a drink of their choosing if FMDB has been useful to you. Finally, and shortly, this is the MIT License. 

    FMDB   ,       .     ,     gus@flyingmeat.com.             ,       ,  FMDB   .  ,    ,   MIT. 

It is remarkable that the authors of the code approached the issue of a license with a bit of humor and left in addition to the standard text also such a postscript. And it is doubly remarkable that such an addition completely leads to thoughts on another type of license - Beerware. Did not hear about this? If not, then let's get to know her. So, meet:

Beerware licenses are related to Donationware licenses. If you are suddenly unfamiliar with this category, then for a literacy we will only need a couple of phrases from Wikipedia , according to which donationware means a licensing model that provides a fully functioning software with the ability to donate to a developer whose size can be fixed or installed by the user independently discretion on the basis of own evaluation of the value of the software.

And under Beerware, therefore, you should understand the type of license with sufficient authorization conditions, according to which the user has the right to use the licensing object freely, but at the same time, if he wishes, he can undertake to thank the copyright owner for beer (hence the name of the license) as a sign of how useful it was to use such a licensing object.

According to various sources , the term Beerware originally applied to the license came to a person named John Bristor on April 25, 1987 in Pensacola, Florida, and the first software that was distributed through this licensed model in various BBS'ok, It dates back to 1987-1988. Since then, there have been many variations and variations of this type of license, but the most famous of them was the following:

 /* * ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42): * <phk@FreeBSD.ORG> wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you * can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think * this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return Poul-Henning Kamp * ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- */ 

Her translation:

 /* * ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * " BEER-WARE" ( 42): * <phk@FreeBSD.ORG>   .   ,    *  ,       ,  . *    ,    ,    , *       Poul-Henning Kamp * ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- */ 

The above text is the content of the Beerware License (version 42), sponsored by Paul-Henning Kamp, a venerable UNIX developer from Denmark who, in his own words, decided to give the users of his code real freedom regarding its use, not burdened by excessive legal language of the license. According to him, the GNU family license is just a joke, which contains too many vague statements, so he decided to opt for a simpler license, in the spirit of the BSD-lite license. And so Beerware appeared.

There is information that this license appeared already in 1998, however, according to other sources , it was published only in 2004. But what is most remarkable is that its version number is 42. Those who are in the subject clearly understand that no previous versions 41, 40, 39, etc. and was not. One comrade, for greater certainty, even talked to Camp about the license version, and he confirmed that 42 really means the following:

The BeerWare license has been revision 42 ;-)

i.e:

In a BeerWare license, there must be an answer to the dispute between the BSD licenses and the GPL, so it is obvious that the version should be 42 ;-)

In general, the Beerware license is similar to licenses such as WTFPL, MIT with its wide discretion for the user. As part of the Fedora project, this license has been described as extremely liberal, which allows the use of a licensed program code on its terms and conditions almost as a code in the public domain. The license contains an optional (i.e. non-binding) clause according to which, if the user decides that he should do so, he is entitled to buy beer for the copyright holder. If this condition were mandatory, it would not make the license free. But since this is not the case, the license should be considered free and GPL-compatible. In principle, it can be considered compatible with proprietary licenses, since it does not require mandatory code disclosure.

To date, the Free Software Foundation has not provided any clear explanation regarding this license, however, the comments it provides regarding so-called informal licenses, which are defined as free, non-dupilating, and GPL-compatible, according to the Fund’s description, allow us to apply them and to the license of Beerware. At the same time, the Foundation recommends applying more detailed licenses to replace such informal ones.

The practical application of the license Beerware received in such projects as, for example, mcchunktools , radio , FSL .

It is also worth saying a few words regarding the variations of the text of the license itself. Thus, the resource tldrlegal.com (a project dedicated to software licenses) indicates that in some variations of this license it is not about buying a beer to the author, but about drinking this beverage in honor of the author. There is also an option , according to which the author would be happy to get just non-alcoholic beer.

In addition to these variations, there are even such derivative licenses that are associated with food (for example, Pizzaware (where instead of beer we are talking about pizza), Sushi-ware , Vegetarian-food-ware ) and drinks (for example, Coffeeware , Sake-ware and even Pearl-tea-ware (apparently, there are fans and such), and just any beverage-ware ).

Separately, I would single out the author of the license tequila-ware , since He invented not only tequila, but also several entertaining prohibitions (in particular, about the use of software in relation to communism and socialism).

 "THE TEQUILA-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 44): <charlie@wolf.is> wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you can do whatever you want with this software subject to the following restrictions: 1) If we meet some day, and you think this stuff is worth it, you can buy me some tequila in return. 2) You may not use this software directly or indirectly for any military or paramilitary purpose. This includes, but is not limited to, training, research and development, controlling military hardware, directing military personnel, or troop entertainment. You may not use this software anywhere on a military base or vessel. You may also not use it for developing "games" produced by the military to recruit players as real soldiers. Special exemptions may be granted on a case-by-case basis to organizations thwarting the spread of communism. 3) You may not use this software or its derivatives to develop any projects created chiefly for the use or benefit of any government, government agency, or government sponsored enterprise 4) You may not use this software or its derivatives in connection with communism, socialism, or any organization practicing or advocating for communism or socialism 5) You may not use this software or its derivatives in connection with mass data collection, whether state-sponsored or private, where "mass data collection" refers to any software or service whose business model is based directly or indirectly on collecting and using data from nonpaying users in exchange for provision of a service to those users not directly related to said data. Projects using this software as a component in a larger project that also interfaces with an organization engaged in this business are exempt (ie you can use this in an application that also uses Facebook Connect as long as you are not Facebook.) 

It seems that the author decided to achieve the glory of the author of the JSON license with its well-known and strange for a legal document wording:

 The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil 

Anyway. No less remarkable was the version of the license Hug-ware , where instead of eating and drinking, the author of the software expects hugs from you:

 /****************************************************************************** * "THE HUG-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 2): As long as you retain this notice you * * can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you * * think this stuff is worth it, you can give me/us a hug. * ******************************************************************************/ 

You can, of course, long talk about how such a license as Beerware is really good as a legal document expressing the will of the author of a program code in its conditions. But we can already say with confidence that such a number of derivative versions of licenses allows us to say that the idea with this license went into people The open source user community is successful, and the license itself has received its share of attention and fame.

So if someone wants to be awarded a quality intoxicating drink from his grateful users for his software product, now you know which license will be most suitable for such a case.

Or you can do it as Gus, just choose the desired license and add a postscript that you would like to treat yourself to something good at the meeting.

And if anyone succeeds in persuading Camp to take part in the ADM club, you are now aware that you can attach him on NG as the author of the license itself)

_{^{The illustration is taken from here for the authorship of Kita59, license CC-BY-SA 3.0.}}