Anti-abuse license

Rationale

The purpose of this license is to give end-users and developers maximal freedom to use this software while preventing the authors from being abused by powerful middle-men that repackage software for convenient installation by users. Such potentially abusive middle-men include in particular Linux distributions and similar centralising software distribution schemes developed for other operating systems. The ethos of this license is bollocks to copyright and distributions!

Rules

This software is distributed without any warranty whatsoever.

If you redistribute modified versions of this software to the public, you must clearly mark them as modified.

If you redistribute this software to the public as part of a large collection of software with the purpose of providing end-users with a convenient installation method, you must do one of the following:

(a) Always redistribute the unmodified and latest version provided by the authors. If the lead author releases a new version (on a specific branch, such as 'stable' or 'development'), you must promptly make that new version the default version offered to your users (on that specific branch).

(b) Rename the software, and make it obvious that your modified or obsolete software is in no way connected to the authors of the original software. The users of your version should under no circumstances be under the illusion that they can contact the lead author or any of the authors of the original software if they have any complaints or queries.

(c) Do not in any way directly expose this software to your users.

Otherwise, do whatever you want with this software. In particular, you may freely use the software as part of other projects, and redistribute to the public archival copies of the software (as long as your archive cannot be considered a “convenient installation method” that will be governed by the rules above).