Open sourcers urged to adopt dancing poultry license In an effort to revolutionize the world of open source, a free software advocate has submitted a new license to the Open Source Initiative. The document is two years in the making, and it's known as the CDL, short for Chicken Dance License. "The purpose of this license is to make intellectual property far more entertaining to …
...people take closed source seriously, in spite of click-through licenses, ridiculous support contracts, EULAs with unenforcable claims, patent retardedness, lawyers' stench, NDAs, copyright shenanigans up your rear, vendor lock-in, money extortion AND the BSA breaking down your door to check company policy.
Sheesh.
This sounds good, I think we should adopt this for politics. At the moment in AU the going punishment for lies by politicians seems to be a pat on the back from fellow politicians and a dismissive attitude to public complaints. It would be useful if all polticians caught out in a lie were made to do the chicken dance on national TV once a week every week for every lie they told. The problem is this could lead to a pushing aside of the current schedule of programs and result in solid polly chicken dance 24 hours a day, so we would need a special channel.
Oh dear, silly me, we already have that in Australia, its called "question time live!"
http://www.crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:mss:1249:ggejdpdgpafafejbmion
Simon and the others seem to have missed the fact that clause 4 is optional, as it only applies to people who want to avoid distributing source, so the fact that some of the non-free users get discriminated against seems like an irrelevance to me.
The thing that is problematic to me is that it makes the chicken clause dependent on distribution of source, but doesn't really define which source we're talking about -- whether that was the source one got before any modification, or after any changes that went to make the binary being distributed. Even that doesn't seem to make it non-free, since if one behaved as though the software were under the GPL (except for linking it against real GPL software), it's clear that one would not then be obliged to dance, so it cannot be less Open/Free than the GPL.
It's a shame it's GPL incompatible though -- I could imagine using it for a laugh if it were not for that. Let's hope that this becomes another instance where the OSI and the FSF differ on their decisions -- it would be nice to have this as one in the grey area as being free but not open ;-)
Hi Phillip,
We're currently drafting v0.2 of the CDL. I would love to have your input to help us make it more GPL-friendly. Take a look at https://github.com/supertunaman/cdl and let us know what you think.
We have contacted legal at FSF, and have yet to receive a response. Fedora and debian-legal hate us, and we didn't even ask Fedora!
Only you, and possibly others as well, can make the dream of hilarious IP restrictions come alive!
-tuna
Ummm, isn't the hot dog pictured (nominally) made from pork? Granted that apart from a tiny bit of trotter and some pig lips left over from the dog food manufacturing process there is not that much pork in there but I wasn't aware that they even pretend that there is beef in a hot dog
Or am I just irony impaired today?
I don't know about your neighborhood, but where I am it is easy to find a store selling the Hebrew National brand of hot dogs. These certainly do not contain pork (or I suppose dairy) products: http://www.hebrewnational.com/index.jsp
Though why in the world you'd want to name a Linux distro Beefy Miracle is beyond me...
If I were a star up software I would deliberately break this license for the massive online exposure it would give me when my company did the chicken dance. I would ham it up of course wearing a suit and looking uncomfortable. Then I would issue a statement saying I was very sorry and would abide by the license. Once again gaining massive positive publicity.
I can work round this. We need another clause:
* People for whom the chicken dance presents physical or cultural challenges may substitute any other activity considered similarly ludicrous in the appropriate culture or lifestyle. Nudity is not necessarily discouraged, but should be used to produce hilarity, not arousal. footnote: stage arrows through the head were never funny.
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