Baba Yaga License
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
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Open Source Licensing
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The 'Baba Yaga License' is a whimsical open-source license that has sparked discussion on its ambiguity and effectiveness, with some appreciating its unique style and others questioning its clarity and adherence to traditional open-source principles.
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Sep 1, 2025 at 1:03 PM EDT
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In any case, you can say that in a clearer way.
I have been speculating for over a year about a FOSS license that stipulates and specifies free use.
What I wanted to do was write one that was less absolute: take this, use it, do as thou wilt, so long as you do not accept money for it. But if you use it in such a way as to make money, you must pay us a percentage.
This is more absolute, but I approve.
https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0
I also added "you can't use this to make money" in my license [1] but I was a bit more specific, and I don't think I'm quite finished with the language yet. It feels a bit too specific but also not specific at all, weird mix. Also mine is in a purposefully-unenforceable version of legalese. I really like your magical approach. I've been describing myself as a metamagical artificer for a while now. You might just inspired me to rewrite mine.
Mine goes a bit more extreme than yours though. Not only does mine disallow parasites from using my software, it also disallows abusers of every kind. Bigots too. And the state. In fact lawyers and governments are explicitly disallowed from interpreting or enforcing my license.
- [1]: [url-redacted]
I explicitly reject legalism and fully intend on having as a condition of the license that it cannot be interpreted by legal professionals, and I fully intend on it being invalid in a court of law, and I fully intend on never trying to enforce it.
Those are "serious" stances of mine, but a consequence of having those views is that I can't truly take this class of document seriously. I already knew it was useless to follow legal protocol to the letter in my license since it's inadmissible, so I thought why not have some fun with it.
A lot of the weird characters are vaguely related to the concept on that line of the license. The 3/5 symbol is the index for the anti-social-hierarchy clause. The lambda is the symbol for the recursive (infectious) license clause. The $ is the anti-money clause. And so on... Not all of them are related to something, some I couldn't find any good symbol for.
I wonder if it qualifies as a Free Software or open source licence?
https://opensourcerer.eu/a-new-compact/index.html