iliana etaoin

I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice.

This page describes “Ceci n’est pas une license”, a document you can add to a GitHub repository in lieu of a license.

Ceci n’est pas une licence

(GitHub variant, version 1)

This is not a license.

Copyright (c) [YOUR NAME]. All rights reserved.

Because this software was published on GitHub, you have already been granted a limited license in the GitHub Terms of Service. See “License Grant to Other Users” on https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service.

The author welcomes you to contact them about relicensing subsets of the software for use in other projects.

As far as the law allows, this software comes as is, without any warranty or condition, and no contributor will be liable to anyone for any damages related to this software or this license, under any kind of legal claim.

(To use this document for your code, see https://iliana.fyi/treachery/.)

The goal of this document is to clarify the default state of a GitHub repository that has no license, and reduce occurrences of people asking for license clarification or suggesting an inappropriate license for the software.

This document incorporates a warranty dislcaimer from the Blue Oak Model License.

You may also wish to read boringcactus’ “An Anti-License Manifesto”.

How to use this document

  1. Download the raw Markdown.
  2. Replace [YOUR NAME] with your name.
  3. Modify the “The author welcomes you…” paragraph as desired.
  4. Upload it to your GitHub repository.

We recommend naming this document LICENSE.md, despite the fact that this document is not a license, as this is the only path I’m aware of that GitHub accepts as a copyright statement that is also rendered as Markdown.

There is no SPDX license identifier for this document because this document is not a license.

Permission

Each contributor of this document (including this explanatory text) licenses you to do everything with it that would otherwise infringe that contributor’s copyright to it, including modifying the document or creating new variants.

As far as the law allows, “Ceci n’est pas une license” comes as is, without any warranty at all, and no contributor will be liable to anyone for any damages related to the license or its use, for any kind of legal claim.