Doesn't this violate the license of the license? The very first paragraph says that "changing it is not allowed" – or "no one can change it" in this changed version.
And calling it "GNU" and attributing it (only) to the Free Software Foundation, when they didn't publish this modified version, seems inappropriate. I don't know if the FSF have trademarks on these terms, but this is the kind of confusion trademarks are meant to protect against.
As a final nitpick, I believe (but I might be wrong about this) the phrase "General Public License" is intended to mean a license for the general public, so changing "General" to "Justified" wouldn't make sense in that case (as it would mean that the public is justified, not the license).
I believe you can change it as long as you change the name, which this thing does. (not sure, though, indeed the text doesn't seem to permit derivatives as is)
However, keeping GNU in the name might be problematic.
(and yes, I'm impressed that the justification never uses 2 consecutive spaces or other such tricks)
Parody is fair use, and this is part of a submission to SIGBOVIK 2024. http://tom7.org/bovex/ It's also clearly not competing with the original, since its contents are partially nonsense.
If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the 100% possible
use to the public, the best way to achieve this 100% is to make it 1000%
free software which everyone can redistribute and 100% change under 100%
these terms.
More concretely, Tom7 built a typesetting system (think TeX) that doesn’t only use the bounding boxes of words, or possible hyphenation to align justified text. His system allows for the text to be rewritten via an LLM if rewording would reduce excess spacing compared to the original.
This is a nice project, but terrible to use for legal text specifically.
Legal text uses its own jargon because the specific meaning of specific words in contracts has been exhaustively argued in court, so any lawyer knows exactly what they mean, and very lengthy court cases on this can be avoided.
For an example, this license lacks the word "irrevocable". This is not a small oversight, and makes using anything provided under this license legally dangerous even if you agree with everything else in it.
Somehow, actual lawyers have already gotten into trouble for using LLMs for court filings.
No reasonable person would use this, but it is not a good idea to assume your audience on the internet consists exclusively of reasonable persons. Sometimes it's a good idea to spell out the obvious.
> In this talk—and with this talk—I presented BoVeX, a new computer typesetting system that finally solves the AI alignment problem. It follows the tradition of Knuth's TeX, but with modern amenities such as requiring 128 gigabytes of RAM.
I had a co-worker once who reworded all his long comments to be perfectly justified at 80 columns. It seemed like a waste of time, but he was productive enough overall that nobody cared.
I don’t justify to 80 columns, but I do reword/rephrase to keep to the 70-80 range, as close to 80 as practical.
My justification (hah!) is that, if I put in the effort to write a large comment, I might as well put in the effort to make it relatively easy to read.
A noble goal, but you are possibly making it worse for many people with this additional work, with no clear upside.
Should I read your long comment, I'd prefer being able to chose the width at which I read it and take advantage of automatic wrapping.
If you manually enter line breaks at column 80, suddenly you are making it impossible to read with a higher width, and completely breaking anyone reading on a screen/window with a width smaller than 80 characters (taking zoom / character size at comfortable reading level in account). You are forcing a fixed size on anyone, basically.
You work against your goal by forcing line breaks at an arbitrary position, and doing more work for this.
Just let the reader's software handle this in an optimal way for the reader's situation. You can't yourself because you lack information about the reader, which can change and their can also be several readers, each with their own situation.
Right, code is its own thing with its own customs. For some reasons I didn't assume we were talking about code.
I do wrap my code comments because that's what people expect and want indeed.
On the projects I work professionally we also have a hard limit at 120 characters enforced by checkstyle, so no choice. On personal projects it's usually 80, maybe I should relax that a bit, 120 is quite nice actually.
I remember seeing such amazing justification on BBSs way back when. I think this is an established art form. I didn't compare this license to the regular license, but I'd like to when I have a bit more time.
Hello old aquantance! Might you have gone by another handle during the Shuttle years? I don't recognize this one, though maybe I've flipped a few bits since then.
If it's not replicating the original license 1:1, but rewording it slightly, it's easy: pick the right words, and add some "filler" words where needed.
Look at the second paragraph under "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs". That section is very different, with numbered spacers inserted into it. I'm sure that's some sort of joke or reference, though.
It's easy but it also means this is not the GPL despite what its text claims. It's a new license and may behave differently because some of the words that were changed have specific legal meaning.
That's entirely fair, it's just important to maintain that context in case someone stumbles upon it and takes it at face value thinking it's legally equivalent.
When we speak of free
software, we are referring
to freedom, not price.
FOR THE PROGRAM, TO
THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY
APPLICABLE LAW.
[1]: https://www.oblomovka.com/code/haiku.php3