# bad-licenses: a catalogue of open source licences nobody should ship > Sixty licence texts collected in one directory, none meant for use, useful mainly as a record of how licence drafting fails and what each failure costs the person downstream. **ErikMcClure/bad-licenses** — A compendium of absurd "open-source" licenses. - Repository: https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses - Stars: 2,130 · Forks: 76 - Language: Unknown - License: Unlicense - Published: 2026-10-06 · Updated: 2026-10-06 · Language: en - Canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/erikmcclure-bad-licenses ## Sixty licence texts and nothing else to build The repository is a directory of licence texts and a README that indexes them. That is the whole product. There is no package manifest, no build script, no test suite and no command to run, and the project publishes no GitHub releases. The repository metadata describes it as a compendium of absurd open-source licences, and the README repeats the warning before the first entry: `UNOFFICIAL LEGAL ADVICE: Don't use these. Like, ever.` What makes it worth reading is the shape of the tree. Sixty entries sit at the top level alongside `README.md` and `LICENSE`, and the naming carries the joke: `DEATH.md`, `BOLA-License`, `YOLO-LICENSE`, `overwatch`, `baba-yaga`, `winamp.md`, `monkey-license`. Some entries are extensionless, some are Markdown, which is a small inconsistency that tells you these were collected opportunistically rather than normalised into a schema. The repository is not archived and the last push was on 2026-09-26, so entries are still being added. ## How each entry documents where its text came from The README states that sources, when available, are provided in the descriptions, and it does this consistently enough to be the most useful thing in the file. The Non-White-Heterosexual-Male License links to nonwhiteheterosexualmalelicense.org, the Buena Onda License Agreement links to blitiri.com.ar/p/bola/, the Happy Bunny License points at glm.g-truc.net/copying.txt, and the DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE points at wtfpl.net. Several links are pinned to a commit rather than to a branch. The sltar entry cites a specific blob hash under a particular author's repository, and THE STRONGEST PUBLIC LICENSE cites an exact commit of img2xterm with a line range attached to the licence comment. That matters more here than it would for source code. These texts are jokes, and jokes get edited, moved or deleted. A commit-pinned link is what keeps the quotation honest, and it means a reader can check the licence text the author of this compendium was actually reading rather than whatever occupies that path now. The entries that have no source link are the ones the compendium appears to have written itself, such as the Passive-Aggressive License and the Evil License, both of which are described in the README with an example list instead of a citation. ## What a working licence has that these lack A licence that survives contact with a lawyer does three things: it grants rights, it attaches conditions a party can verify, and it disclaims warranty. Read the catalogue against those three requirements and the entries separate into failures of the second and the third. The JSON License is the clearest case. The README describes it as an MIT-style licence with a morality clause stating that the software shall be used for Good, not Evil, then makes the problem explicit: Good and Evil are subjective, so the clause is legally unenforceable at best, and it may or may not let the author sue you for any reason. You cannot run a test suite against Good. The Katharos License reaches the same wall by a different route, demanding religious purity and requiring usage to be good as defined by the full 66 books of the Holy Bible. The Do No Harm License tries harder to be specific and still fails, listing gambling, nuclear energy, burning down forests and lobbying against peace as bad purposes. Only one of those four has a definition attached to it. Warranty disclaimer is the other half. Almost none of these texts disclaim fitness for a purpose, so the risk of using one falls back on you with no allocation stated on paper. ## Licences that decide who may run the code A second family of entries attaches conditions to the identity of the user rather than to the software. The Overwatch License permits modification only if your competitive rank in Overwatch is higher than the maintainer's, which is a condition no build system can test and no court can measure. The Anyone But Richard Stallman License lets anyone do anything with the software except Richard Stallman, who cannot use or redistribute it in any way. The Anyone But Some Assholes license bars groups of people the author dislikes. The Be Gay Do Crimes License requires two things of the user, one of which is a criminal act, and the Bantown Public License requires you to commit criminal acts before you may use the code at all. The sltar License is the darkest entry. Using the software requires giving your first child to the author so that they can immolate it to the devil. The Non-White-Heterosexual-Male License inverts the pattern, granting freedom to anyone who is not a white heterosexual male and imposing rules on everyone else. Two entries restrict what you may do rather than who you are, and both are common failure modes in real projects. The Protected Free To Use Software License forbids redistributing binaries ever, for any reason, except on GitHub. The Passive-Aggressive License allows you to copy, modify or distribute source or compiled binaries but does not let you run the program. ## Parody entries and the ones written as real terms Several entries are plainly parody, and the README does not pretend otherwise. YOLO-LICENSE is summarised in the index as a single line of nonsense. THE STRONGEST PUBLIC LICENSE is based on the WTFPL and adds a condition that you appreciate Cirno as the strongest in Gensokyo. THE LITTLE SUS DISTRO LICENSE, VERSION 1 is a BSD-style parody with an unfortunate acronym, and the README records that earlier revisions were named THE I AM BASED AND NOT SUSSY LICENSE and THE Sussy Baka LICENSE, VERSION 1, one of which carried the JSON License's Good and not Evil clause plus a non-commercial clause. Others are written in the grammar of a real licence, which is where the catalogue earns its keep. The Hot Potato License transfers exclusive ownership of the entire project to whoever committed the last change, a term that cannot be satisfied by more than one person and leaves no mechanism for resolving the tie. The Minecraft Mod Public License requires the end-user to own a legal copy of Minecraft, which is a condition on the end-user's behaviour that a distributor cannot verify, and the index itself says it should not be used on anything that is not a Minecraft mod. The MRMO-Halftone license is the best argument in the file for reading these carefully. It is two-tiered for non-commercial and commercial use, and both tiers exclude anything relating to non-fungible tokens or blockchain-related projects. The README then asks the questions the drafters never answered: Git uses a merkle-tree, so is that blockchain? Does blockchain only mean proof-of-work? What about proof-of-stake? Without clarification the exclusion is broad enough to support a claim against almost anyone. ## Where this differs from a curated list of licences Searches for this project keep landing on the opposite kind of resource. Phrases like OSI approved licenses, BSD License, Copyleft license and Different types of open source licenses describe the curated lists that exist to help you choose, and those lists are reviewed, versioned and tied to recognised bodies. A curated list is a decision tool. This repository is an archive of decision tools that failed. That difference is not cosmetic. A curated list tells you what a licence permits, and the useful question is whether the terms fit your distribution model. This catalogue can only tell you what went wrong, which is a different and narrower contribution. Read as a checklist, the entries map neatly onto the mistakes that show up in real projects: a condition attached to something unverifiable, a restriction scoped to the wrong party, an exception written as an afterthought, and a parody that quietly became load-bearing because somebody shipped a dependency under it. One licensing detail settles the recursion problem the catalogue invites. The compendium itself is published under the Unlicense, recorded in the tree as LICENSE. The Unlicense grants broad permission without conditions, so the entries quoting other authors carry no obligations from this repository. The texts remain other people's work, which is why the README attributes them rather than adopting them. ## Conclusion This repository works as a negative index rather than a source of grant language. Its value is that each entry pairs an unusual clause with the thing it makes impossible to decide: whether you may ship a binary, whether a build can be verified, whether a court can enforce anything at all. Its own licensing answers the question the entries keep raising, because the compendium is published under the Unlicense while the texts inside it are quoted from other authors who chose conditions. Start at LICENSE to see what the project itself considers permissible, then read the entries in the README for the catalogue, and take any decision about your own project to a licence that was written to be reviewed by counsel. ## FAQ ### Is any licence in the bad-licenses repository safe to use? Not according to the project itself, which opens its README with unofficial legal advice not to use any of them. The repository's own LICENSE is the Unlicense, and that grant covers the compendium's own text only. The licences catalogued inside are quoted from other authors and still carry whatever conditions those authors wrote. ### Why does the JSON License say the software shall be used for Good, not Evil? It is a deliberate joke on top of an MIT-style grant, and the README explains why it does not work: Good and Evil are subjective, so the clause is legally unenforceable at best, and it may or may not allow the author to sue you for any reason. Nobody can check compliance, so the condition cannot be evaluated by a reviewer or a court. ### What does the Overwatch licence actually restrict? Modification of the source code is permitted only if your competitive rank in Overwatch is higher than the maintainer's. The index in the README presents it as an example of a condition attached to something no build process can observe. ### How is this different from a list of OSI approved licences? An OSI list is a curated decision aid reviewed and maintained as a reference. bad-licenses is a collection of licences whose authors were not trying to help you choose, kept for the record. It tells you what failure looks like, not what terms to adopt. ## Sources - [ErikMcClure/bad-licenses on GitHub](https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses) - [Issues](https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses/issues) - [License: Unlicense](https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses/blob/master/LICENSE) - [README](https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses/blob/master/README.md) --- Hysen Labs editorial analysis, written from the project's own repository and release notes. Cite the canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/erikmcclure-bad-licenses