Logo: stylised “Q” with a shadow of an “O” on its left and a shadow of an “L” on its right Opinionated Queer License v1.1

© Copyright Andrea Vos

Permissions

The creators of this Work (“The Licensor”) grant permission to any person, group or legal entity that doesn't violate the prohibitions below (“The User”), to do everything with this Work that would otherwise infringe their copyright or any patent claims, subject to the following conditions:

Obligations

The User must give appropriate credit to the Licensor, provide a copy of this license or a (clickable, if the medium allows) link to oql.avris.it/license/v1.1, and indicate whether and what kind of changes were made. The User may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the Licensor endorses the User or their use.

Prohibitions

No one may use this Work for prejudiced or bigoted purposes, including but not limited to: racism, xenophobia, queerphobia, queer exclusionism, homophobia, transphobia, enbyphobia, misogyny.

No one may use this Work to inflict or facilitate violence or abuse of human rights as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

No law enforcement, carceral institutions, immigration enforcement entities, military entities or military contractors may use the Work for any reason. This also applies to any individuals employed by those entities.

No business entity where the ratio of pay (salaried, freelance, stocks, or other benefits) between the highest and lowest individual in the entity is greater than 50 : 1 may use the Work for any reason.

No private business run for profit with more than a thousand employees may use the Work for any reason.

Unless the User has made substantial changes to the Work, or uses it only as a part of a new work (eg. as a library, as a part of an anthology, etc.), they are prohibited from selling the Work. That prohibition includes processing the Work with machine learning models.

Sanctions

If the Licensor notifies the User that they have not complied with the rules of the license, they can keep their license by complying within 30 days after the notice. If they do not do so, their license ends immediately.

Warranty

This Work is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied. The Licensor will not be liable to anyone for any damages related to the Work or this license, under any kind of legal claim as far as the law allows.


TL;DR

You can You cannot You must
  • Use privately
  • Use commercially
  • Modify
  • Adapt
  • Distribute
  • Sublicense
  • Use a patent
  • Add a warranty
  • Hold the Licensor liable
  • Be a big corporation
  • Be law enforcement or military
  • Use for bigoted purposes
  • Use for violent purposes
  • Just blatantly resell it
    (even if laundered through machine learning)
  • Give credit
  • Indicate changes made
  • Include license or a link
Motivation

I create lots of things, mostly software, and I put them on the Internet for free. As an author I have the right to decide under which conditions do I waive my copyrights. Common practice is to just pick one of the permissive licenses, many of which aim to maximise the user's freedom…

But I don't care.

The whole point of me giving away stuff for free is to make the world a slightly better place – so if someone wants to use them for evil, then screw their freedom. I'm queer, I'm a member of minoritised communities – and I can't just blindly worship “freedom” in a world where so many use their freedom to actively hurt the most vulnerable.

I don't want my work to be freely used – I want it used for good.

So, my license prohibits any use by big corporations, cops, military, or use in a bigoted or violent way.

You're free to use it too, just keep in mind that I am not a lawyer. This license is inspired by and based on Leftcopy, The Social Domain, The Hippocratic License, ACAB License, the fuck around and find out license, The Anti-Capitalist Software License, The JSON License, CC-BY-NC-SA, Jamie Kyle's MIT License, Copilot resistant licenses, and the anti-license manifesto.