The Anti-Terrorism Software License
Revision: 1.0, 2006-12-07
License
Copyright ©yyyy by Author Name, all rights reserved.
Permission is granted to any person or entity except those designated by
the United States Department of State as a terrorist, or terrorist
government or agency, to use and distribute this source code provided
that the original copyright notice remains present and unaltered.
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Use
To use the license, simply include the text above in your source code.
This is typically done within a block comment at the beginning of the
source file.
Replace yyyy with the year in which the code was written,
and replace Author Name with the name of the author (your name).
Purpose
- 1. Original authorship and copyright
-
The copyright notice establishes the original author of the work (the source
code).
This means that the original author owns the rights to the code, as well as
the rights to all derivative works, in accordance with copyright law.
It is explicitly required that the original copyright notice be kept intact
and unaltered in any source code derived from the code.
These are the only terms of the license, which exist so that the author of
the code receives full credit for his creative efforts.
- 2. Permission to use and distribute
-
Explicit permission is granted to use and distribute the source code in its
original form or in any derivative form.
So while the original author of the code owns the copyright to it and any of
its modified forms, the author at the same time grants permission to use the
code without restriction, royalties, or any other encumbrance, as long as
the terms of the license are met.
- 3. Prohibition against use or distribution
-
Terrorists are expressly prohibited from using or distributing the source
code.
A terrorist is defined as any individual, organization, agency,
or other entity who engages in terrorist activities;
specifically, any entity designated as a terrorist by the
U.S. Department of State.
More information can be obtained from the
Office of the Coordinator for
Counterterrorism.
- 4. Short and sweet
-
Unlike most other software licenses, this one is very short and to the point.
It manages to specify creative ownership and terms of use using relatively few
words.
Its small size makes it very suitable for inclusion in the header comments of
source files, eliminating the need to refer to a much larger document external
to the source code itself.
The license by itself does not prevent terrorism, of course.
It does, however, provide some legal obstructions to terrorist activities.
Anyone caught using the source code covered by the license could, in theory,
be convicted of copyright violation.
While this is not much in the way of meting out justice, it adds one more
(albeit small) item to the long list of crimes terrorists commit against
civilized society.
It should be remembered that Al Capone was convicted
and imprisoned not because of the murders and bootlegging he committed but
because of income tax evasion.
If nothing else, using this license in your source code is a way of publicly
expressing your disdain for terrorism and its elements.
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