why i put all my shit in the public domain

A defense of my weird licensing opinions.

License conversations are opinionated. They're opinionated to the point that they aren't useful. People I know have been discouraged from developing their tools because of licensing arguments. If a new tool or application pops up on Github, I can expect some comment in the issues along the lines of,

You should license this! Use [insert writer's favourite license]: that way, people will use your product!

Licensing is ubiquitous, and I hate it, and I want to see it die (lol jk).

What is the purpose of a license?

Licensing exists to make people and corps act in certain ways, according to what the developer thinks is right. It can be as simple as "Please give me credit"; or somewhat more restrictive, "You must license your shit in the same way as me." This is (IMO) of dubious morality in the case of people & absolutely moral in the case of corps. But there's a problem:

corps = people

If you can't legally distinguish between two entities, it becomes tricky to bind one and not the other.

Maybe human beings care about the rules: I might stop myself from integrating some MIT-licensed tool into my own thing because of licensing considerations. More than likely, I ignore the terms for personal projects & respect them for public ones. I act within the spirit of the license, if not exactly the letter.

But when it comes to corporate greed, the fact is, corps don't give a fuck and will use your shit anyway. And when you try to fight back, they will lawyer up. They will drag it out. They will hide their crimes behind "closed-source" and pretend they've never heard of you.

No licenses, no masters.

So where has licensing gotten us?

I do not care about what individual people do with my tools and writing. I am not at a point in my life where I'm making things that are useful to the corporate ecosystem. And I'm not making shit that's useful to fascists.

Thank God.

I have easy calculus and the luxury of a simple solution: no licenses. Refuse to engage with the system of intellectual property that fails to free people, or to bind corporations. Put shit out and just say fuck it.