A year ago, I came across somewhat alcoholic THE BEER-WARE LICENSE, and this year, I got a pizza license:


------------------------------------------------------------------
"THE PIZZA-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
Peter Hofmann <pcode@uninformativ.de> wrote these files. As long as you
retain this notice you can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we
meet some day, and you think this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a
pizza in return.
------------------------------------------------------------------

I can’t find a homepage of it, not sure where it’s originated from, but THE BEER-WARE LICENSE text’s author’s name and email address are used in THE PIZZA-WARE LICENSE, so is the number 42.

More that that, I can even find the license on different Linux distributions’ packages websites, and some packages that are licensed under this license. It seems to be around for some time.

I am curious who made this license, anyway, it’s non-alcoholic, Muslim developers or whoever doesn’t touch alcohol can use it and get something they can enjoy in return. I wonder if there are TEA, COFFEE, VEGETARIAN, VEGAN, GLUTEN-FREE, FREE RANGE, RAW, SOYA, et cetera.

Whoever license under this license should replace with their name and email address, but still quite often to see this happening, even for a license text this short. No one reads license text, right?

1   An email from Peter Hofmann

I have been exchanged some emails with Peter Hofmann about his German blog, uninformativ.de, asked him a possibility of having something in English, and it might be coming if you happen to stumble on his blog.

Anyway, he somehow found this blog post and read it, then sent me an email on September 12, with his permission, I am posting the entire email:


Hi again,

I recently found your blog posting about the pizza-ware license [0]. As
you picked "my version" of it, I thought I'd might share some thoughts
about it. :-)

Unlike phk, I don't think that the GPL is a joke. In fact, I consider it
to be very important. At least, it's important for large projects with a
huge impact (big web browsers, video codecs, ...). These projects should
use the GPL or similar licenses to make sure the code stays free. For
me, though, it's just too complicated. The GPL's text is longer than
some of my source code files. I just want my stuff to be free and
anybody should be able to use it.

When I was initially looking for a simple license, I came across the
beer-ware license. I liked the idea, but I don't like beer. :-) I do
like pizza, though, so I changed it to reflect that.

I was not the first to come up with a pizza-ware license. Since about
2006, the pizza-ware license was listed as a beer-ware variant in the
german wikipedia. [1] (I only started using it in 2010. If I remember
correctly, "explain" was the first project to use it [2].) It recently
got removed from that list [3], because the wikipedia authors consider
pizza-ware to be too rare. Pff. ;-)

Another interesting fact is that beer-ware (and variants) were once
explicitly listed by the FSF as GPL-compatible. I checked that when I
started using it. Today, they only mention "informal licenses" [4] and I
believe that beer-ware falls into that category. However, the FSF warns
about using it because the legal status of beer-ware is a bit unclear.

I never saw another variant of the beer-ware license in the wild. Not
that I remember, anyway. Even beer-ware itself is very rare. The german
wikipedia mentions some more variants [5], might be worth googling them.

Okay, well, that's pretty much it. :-)

Cheers!
Peter


[0] https://yjlv.blogspot.com/2015/08/pizza-ware-license-revision-42.html
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beerware&diff=prev&oldid=19878421
[2] https://github.com/vain/explain/commit/5b6abf9b1841eb9c8be4fb224eece22f0dd5cfd3
[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beerware&diff=prev&oldid=143718797
[4] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#informal
[5] https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beerware&oldid=145830717

He also has a post about his version of PIZZA-WARE, Lizenz-Foo. It’s written in German, I did try to read it with Google Translate, let’s just say I wish I can read German.

We exchanged some thoughts about licensing and licenses, if you want to share or join discussions, please do.