The “Free Yourself” License

Updated 2024-11-15 03:54 CST

The “Free Yourself” Licenses are custom software licenses 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.

NOTE: I am not a lawyer, and I am not providing legal advice. I am not advising you to use the “Free Yourself” Licenses, or any other license, for your software or other works. Should you choose to use any of the “Free Yourself” Licenses, you do so at your own risk.

At time of writing, there have been three versions of the Free Yourself License used by me in public repositories. For completeness’s sake, all three are included below. For the record, if you use any software that was released by me under one of the licenses listed below, you have my permission to upgrade (or downgrade) according to your interest.

Explanation

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.

All but the first draft of the “Free Yourself” License explicity place the covered source code into the public domain, but the effect is largely the same either way. I’m not interested in making people jump through hoops just so they can use my source code, and I shouldn’t have to fill five pages with legaleze just so people can use something I’ve publicly posted anyway.

The problem is that a lot of jurisdictions, even in the United States, get really cagey about copyrights, owing to how invasive, manipulative, and outright evil modern intellectual property law is now. A lot of courts think that something presented on a public forum with the understanding that other people would be able to see, copy, and use it still needs some kind of grant of permission for you to actually exercise your God-given rights as a citizen of the Information Age. 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.

The reason all of the drafts after the first one include an explicit public domain dedication is that I, frankly, got tired of playing the courts’ word games. Piracy is a market inevitability, and in practice only the corpos who are rich enough to be able to afford lawyers and extremely delusional people really seem to care what the law says about copyrights anyway, so my permission notice should be more than sufficient.

Okay, so that’s the first few sentences of the license out of the way. What about the rest of it?

Careware

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

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