I have done the second most recommended thing in computer science, after rolling your own cryptography: i rolled my own license.

For now, i’m only using that license on one project, Synth Printer, which i’ve recently moved away from Github to git.gay, a Forgejo instance run by a bunch of commie kids with zero budget. I plan to use it on other software in the future, too.

Securing the Supply Chain

Let me explain: have you heard about Supply Chain Attacks? They go about like this:

—“Madame Aria Salvatrice, this is GitHub here. Your javascript library YALP - Yet Another Left-Pad is used by Lockheed Martin, Monsanto, Electronic Arts, McDonald’s, and Adolf Hitler.”
—“Oh that thing i wrote one day i was shitfaced lmao i haven’t updated it in 8 years. Cool.”
—“And you just accepted a pull request by user KinkySatanicPuppygirl2 whose profile picture depicts the character named Leonmitchelli Galette des Rois from the Japanese animation series Dog Days (2011).”
—“Yeag.”
—“Your library is used to generate 26 billions of yearly revenue and this latest pull request added a vulnerabiliy to a cross-site buffer privilege distributed escalation spoofing attack (CVE-8008135). They demand a fix.”
—“Lol sucks to suck. Will they pay me?”
—“No”

Join us now and share the softwa-aa—a—a—are

Look, it’s starting to be pretty damn obvious that “Free Software” and """Open-Source""" are no longer the kinda hippie shit we tought them to be back when they’d give you Linux distros CDs with magazines about computer touching.

The Free Software Foundation has been sliding into irrelevance more and more by entirely failing to address its big Creepy Uncle problem. Open-Source has turned into a form of unpaid internship to be hired to make shitty apps that bring more surveillance and ads to our world.

And back when magazines existed, you know what they’d put on their CDs too? Freewares and sharewares. Old-school honest-to-gods “this shit is free, no catch” and “this shit costs twelve bux, here’s a demo”. The world was so trusting back then, shareware guys just plain told you their doxx so you could mail a check to their house.

Freewares used to be compiled binary files, but nowadays, only high-performance software gets compiled, so it’s common to give the user the source code, and since they can edit the source, it’s common to accept fixes from users.

But what kind of projects get a lot of fixes from their users? Definitely not hobby software for end-users like mine. It’s almost always the work of a single person, with small scale contributions, like correcting spelling mistakes, fixing simple bugs, adding a small feature someone really wanted. And my software isn’t a library meant to become a hidden part of infrastructure—it’s some app meant to be used interactively by people.
Even if i were to slap Creepy Uncle Richard’s license on it, it remains functionally more of a freeware than a Libre Software endeavor. I’m not fooling myself it will grow a community of developers.

A detour into the world of blinky honking toys

And you know, i’m interested in hardware hacking—DIY synths. Which means i am legally required to talk about Mutable Instruments. It was a one-woman company (from my own country, i should not pass over this fact in silence) who made cool synthesizers.
It was all open-source. Hardware, software. She hoped it’d spur people’s creativity.
And yeah, sure, people made a bunch of alternative firmwares.
But you know what people mostly did? Clones. Clones that’d cut corners. They’d make the modules smaller with worse ergonomics, they’d use lower quality parts. Then the users asked her for free tech support for those shitty clones.
And when her fellow countrypeople from Arturia bundled her synthesis code in their synth? She barely got a credit, while another brand who commercially licensed code for the synth got the spotlight.
After she decided to change careers, what’s her legacy? A fucking Behringer clone—a trash company that has no engineering team to speak of and only steals the products of better companies, and is known to sue their critics and make weird antisemitic ads against respected industry bloggers.

We’re all extremely tired

And here’s the thing: if it’s easy to acquire the source code of my stuff, what is there to stop a hobbyist from modifying it? Nothing. Even if i had the drive, the moral right, the legal right to stop them, and a complete insensitivity to optics, it’d still make zero economic sense to sue a hobbyist.

So you know? The deal is simple.
If you’re a little guy, do whatever you want with my work.
If you’re a big guy, fuck you pay me.

I’m far from the first having ideas in that vein. There’s a growing feeling that Open-Source is just capitalist tech bro decorum no longer serving our communities, expressed for example in the Opinionated Queer License, the ml5.js license, the ACAB license, the Anti-Capitalist Software License, the Black Open Source Software (BOSS) License, the Anyone But Richard M. Stallman license, the Non-White-Heterosexual-Male License, the Satania Daiakuma License.
There’s a bunch more great options in this repository named Good Licenses (due to a spelling mistake, the author seems to have accidentally named the repository bad-licenses).

The main benefit of those licenses is obviously making (*pompous clown music starts playing*) the Free Software Foundation’s Licensing and Compliance Lab and the Orange Website commenters lose their shit.

By design, our small-scale freewares will never become businesses, load-bearing infrastructure, or attract a community of regular contributors. We might as well use our license for political commentary.
Or at least, for shitposting.

With that said, i now proudly present to you the full text of the Forklift Certified License, version 0.69.420, by Aria Salvatrice, also available as a Markdown file.

Forklift Certified License

Forklift Certified License, version 0.69.420, by Aria Salvatrice.

Preamble

The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to make it easy for capital to fuck you over. By contrast, the Forklift Certified License is intended to guarantee my homies have the freedom to:

  1. Fork this work
  2. Lift some good shit from this work

It’s not following the OSI definition of open-source because i don’t give a damn how capital defines its needs. Also your lawyer gonna be terrified by this shit and that’s the whole damn point lmao: if you can pay a lawyer, you can pay me for a license that doesn’t look so fucked up; but if you can’t pay a lawyer, you’re not worth suing.

It’s not compatible with other licenses because it doesn’t need to be. It’s copy-pasted from the anti-capitalist license with stuff i stole from the ml5js license plus some shit from the opinionated queer license and i added a clause about Palestine liberation because operating a forklift means you can lift up the oppressed.

Contributor License Agreement

Unless you clearly state otherwise, by sending contributions to the Author, such as Git pull requests, you grant the Author of the Work unlimited reproduction rights over the contribution, allowing the Author to distribute the Work under a different license, or a revised version of the Forklift Certified License in the future.

Permissions

The Author of the Work grants the permission, free of charge, to any person or group (“The User”, “My Good Bitch”, “The Girl Reading This”, and other nicknames of that nature), to do with this Work anything that would otherwise infringe its copyright, subject to all the following conditions:

  1. The above copyright notice and a copy of the Forklift Certified License must be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Work.
  2. Should The User make a non-trivial modification to the work, they/she/he/it/ey/fae/ze/bun/puppy/foxxo must remove or alter the identifying brand elements of the original work, following any guidelines provided by the Author, to make it clear to everyone The User’s version was modified from the original.
  3. The User may not use this Work for prejudiced or bigoted purposes, including but not limited to: racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, Zionism, casteism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, enbyphobia, ableism, rape apology, pedophilia apology, zoophilia apology, misogyny, Belgium denialism, fashjacketing, pedojacketing, etc.
  4. If the User is an organization with paid workers, the ratio of pay between the highest and the lowest paid individual cannot be greater than 2:1.
  5. If the User is an organization with paid workers, the amount of employees cannot exceed 10.
  6. The User cannot be an organization that is, or that knowingly deals with any of the following:
  7. The User may not sell this Work directly, unless they/she/he/it/ey/fae/ze/bun/puppy/foxxo have made substantial changes to it, or use it only as a small part of a work of a much greater scale.

Self-detonation

Every new version of this work is licensed under the Forklift Certified License upon publication.

Once a version of this work is over 10 years old, you may elect to receive it under the terms of the CC0 license, which makes it functionally part of the public domain. However, this clause does not apply to revisions more recent than 10 years old.

Shouting

THE WORK IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE WORK OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE WORK. AWOO.

Metta

May all beings be peaceful.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be safe.
May all beings awaken to the light of their true nature.
May all beings be free.

Recursion

The text of this license is licensed under the terms of the Forklift Certified License.