Beware of Beerware?

[Yaakov Nemoy]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 5:58 PM, Rahul Sundaram
<sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, 2008-08-11 at 15:54 +0200, Simon Wesp wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I want to start a review request and the application i packed is
>>> published under Beerware [1] which is not listed in Licensing [2]. I'm not
>>> sure, if i can do this, because there is no no-warrenty clausel in it.
>>> Would you say Beerware is a good license, or not?
>>
>> Effectively, this is Copyright only. These sorts of "joke licenses"
>> probably won't hold up in court, but we probably don't inherit any
>> serious legal risk from them.
>
> Upstream should be advised to move to some standard permissive license like
> the MIT or revised 2-clause BSD license. Without a disclaimer, there is some
> legal risk for the developers especially in U.S.

Theoretically, couldn't we slap some kind of 2-clause license on it
when redistributing it ourselves, just to protect our own behinds?

Better yet, I propose the 3-beer clause license.  The first two
clauses are analogous to a standard 2-clause BSD license, and the
third offers the recommendation to buy 1) the author, 2) the packager
and 3) the user a round of beers.

-Yaakov