The “Free Yourself” License is a custom software license inspired by FreeBSD developer Poul-Henning Kamp’s “Beer-Ware License.” It is an essentially public-domain-equivalent license granting full freedom to any recipient of the software to change and re-license the software as desired, with a little careware message baked in for good measure. The full text of the license follows, after which you can find a brief essay about software licensing and an explanation of the careware message.
<email@sample.com> wrote this file. Feel free to do whatever you want with it so long as you don’t hold me liable for any damages; there is no warranty. In exchange, if you ever find yourself thinking “I can’t do this,” or “I’ll never be that good,” I want you to stop, take a deep breath, and say “Yes I can.” Then prove you can. Don’t prove it to me; don’t prove it to your friends and family; don’t prove it to your boss; prove it to yourself. This software is already free; now free yourself.
- Philip PavlickFor more information about the rationale behind this licensing, see https://pavlick.net/fyl/
I feel that the licensing terms here are fairly self-explanatory; just bear in mind that the software is released “as-is” and without warranty and you can modify, share, and commercially exploit the software or do anything else with it as you so choose.
There are a few reasons why I drafted such a permissive and bare-bones license. Part of it is simply that a lot of popular licenses clutter things up with legaleze that I frankly find unnecessary. We don’t need lawyers and thinktanks to interpret what is or is not a “permissive” license; we just need to unambiguously tell people that it’s okay to copy and modify stuff and be done with it. This is a throwback to a simpler time, when you could just share stuff and nobody had to worry about ending up in court over it, and that appeals to me. I’m a practical guy and I don’t feel the need to complicate everything.
In a perfect world, I would just commit my code to the public domain and be done with it, but in practice it turns out that some jurisdictions are kind of iffy about the public domain, and like to prosecute people for distributing public domain works anyway, because even though the author has waived all copyright and other interests in the software they still have to explicitly grant permission to use it. Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen.
So I wrote the “Free Yourself” License as an explict grant of that permission, kind of like the Unlicense but shorter, just how I like it.
Okay, so that’s the first sentence of the license out of the way, what about the rest of it?
Besides the one-sentence public-domain-equivalent license and liability disclaimer, the Free Yourself License contains what I call the “careware clause,” which is all of this:
In exchange, if you ever find yourself thinking “I can’t do this,” or “I’ll never be that good,” I want you to stop, take a deep breath, and say “Yes I can.” Then prove you can. Don’t prove it to me; don’t prove it to your friends and family; don’t prove it to your boss; prove it to yourself. This software is already free; now free yourself.
There’s a reason I attached this to my software license. On July 9th of 2018 I got hit with a major anxiety attack. I thought I was dying. It turns out I wasn’t dying, though; I was just freaking out for no apparent reason. As I sat on a bed calming down, I tried to figure out why I was panicking, and I realized that it was because I had allowed myself to stagnate, and had become content to suffer the life of a failure, a fake, and a loser. I remember thinking “you aren’t dying, but you should be. You deserve it.” And then I realized something…
Fuck that noise.
Anxiety and self-doubt can only control you if you let them. Don’t get me wrong, they are serious problems, and it is hard to break free of them, but it can be done. If these are issues that you struggle with, please seek help. Reach out to your friends and family for support; if you need it, seek therapy; practice mindfulness and pursue passions that will give you purpose and self-actualization. Free yourself from self-sabotage and self-deprecation. You can do it! It’s not too late. It’s never too late.
If you need inspiration, this video from Markiplier has helped to remind me to have a goal and reach for it, and this video from Vsauce has helped me learn how to bounce back from defeats and strike out at new challenges. For me, those challenges came in the form of my game development projects like SwashRL and Orange Guy’s Quest. Maybe for you it will be something else, but the point is to enable yourself to seek your purpose. Find your inner self, and free them.
Of course, real mental health problems can’t be fixed with a simple word of encouragement, that well I know; but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. If this message resonated with you, then I hope that I’ve motivated you to take that first step and make yourself into the person that you’ve always wanted to be.
If you find your struggle to be too much to handle on your own, please consider calling a crisis helpline in your area or seeking out another support forum. There are people out there who genuinely want to help, and if you look you might find they’re just a few clicks away. If you ever find yourself thinking you’re not worth anything and you don’t deserve help, please consider this message from my friend Mike. He changed my mind; hopefully he can change yours.
Sincerely,
- Philip Pavlick
Life wouldn't seem tragic were it not also beautiful.
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