The daysant licence

Summary

This is not a substitute for the licence text.

You are free to use, share, copy, and modify the work, subject to the conditions that you are not:

• a private organisation,
• law enforcement, military, or an intelligence agency,
• cramming it full of spyware,
• too ass lazy to do anything and need an AI to communicate your thoughts.

You must not deprive others of their right to use, share, copy, and modify the work. If it is a program, you must also disclose the source code.

Licence text

1. Definitions

1. The "licence" is defined as the daysant Licence.
2. "Copyright" is defined as any laws or provisions that relate to copyright or are copyright-like.
3. "You" are defined as any party who is a licencee. You may either be an individual or an organisation.
4. The "author" is defined as any party who holds copyright on the work. This includes the original creator and all other contributors.
5. The "work" is defined as the copyrightable work licensed under this licence.
6. To "use" a work means to do anything with the work that, without the grants and permissions of this licence, would make you liable for copyright infringement.
7. To “modify” a work means to adapt or copy a work, in whole or in part, other than the creation of a verbatim copy. The resulting work is the "derivative work", based off the earlier work called the "original work".
8. To “distribute” a work means to use the work which makes the work available to any third party in any way. The work can be a modified work or the original work.
9. An “attribution method” refers to any one of a hyperlink, button, menu option, or any other mechanism by which parties who use the work can find information that is specified in later provisions of the licence.
10. A "private company" is any organisation, company, or other association for the primary purpose of generating profit for its owners or shareholders, including but not limited to private or public corporations, limited liability companies, joint-stock companies, or any other company where ownership is tradeable or held as capital investment.
11. This does not include sole traders, worker or customer co-operatives, state enterprises, or equivalent structures in other jurisdictions.
12. "Generative AI" refers to any machine learning program, or the algorithms and datasets associated with them, including large language models, text-to-image models, or any other form of artifical intelligence, machine learning algorithm, or any other algorithm or program which produces output material intended to be distributed to other parties.

2. Agreement to the licence

1. By using, modifying, distributing, copying, or otherwise using this work, you agree to this licence in full.
2. In the event you take part in any action that contradicts or violates the provisions of this licence, it immediately becomes null and void and you may be liable for copyright infringement.
3. In the event that a particular clause of the licence is found to be unenforceable or otherwise legally invalid, you and the author agree to substitute it with an enforceable substitute that accurately replaces the original intent of the clause. This does not effect other clauses of this licence.

3. Terms of the licence

Subject to the terms of this licence, the author grants you a free of charge, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and perpetual licence to the use, modification, distributing, copying, and sub-licensing of the work, subject to the following conditions:

1. The author is clearly attributed through an attribution method in the work.
2. The original work can be found by an attribution method in the work.
3. You are not, do not have an affiliation with, acting as an agent of, or otherwise are not a representative or beneficiary of:
   1. a private company,
   2. any person or organisation that develops, trains, operates, uses, or otherwise involves with generative AI,
   3. any law enforcement, military organisation, or state intelligence organisation.
4. Any information collected through the work cannot be sold to any party.
5. This licence must be included with all copies of the work.
6. No further restrictions, legal or technological, can be applied to the work such that it would prevent the further use or modification of the work.

4. Disclaimer of warranty

1. The work is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.
2. In no event shall the authors or copyright holders 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 user of other dealings in the work.

5. Software annex

1. The "source form" of the work is defined as the primary form of the work that is used to make modifications to the work by the author. All other forms of the work are the "product form" of the work.
2. The work must be distributed in source form, or in product form with an attribution method that points to an archive, copy, repository, or other record of the source form that was used to produce the product form.
3. The author hereby irrevocably waives any and all patent rights they may have over the work or may acquire in the future related to the work. This waiver applies to every use, copying, modification, and distribution of the original work and derivative works thereof.

Appendices

Some information about the licence. These appendices, though, are not part of the licence.

Application

Applying the licence is fairly easy. Simply attach the licence document somewhere in your project, or simply a link to this page. By common convention, though, it is typical to place the licence in the root directory of your project, often in Markdown.

The software annex adds requirements to disclose source code and waives all patents in the software. This is pre-included in all downloads for the licence but if you are not making a program you should generally take it out.

Philosophy

The philosophy of this licence comes from a rejection of the traditional open-source narrative. Go read Digital Imperialism and its addendum Left Copyleft for the full philosophy.

TL;DR: the GPL is a liberal's solution to big tech's imperialism, of which I do not support.