Beerware is a

tongue-in-cheek The idiom tongue-in-cheek refers to a humorous or sarcastic statement expressed in a serious manner. History The phrase originally expressed contempt, but by 1842 had acquired its modern meaning. Early users of the phrase include Sir Walter Scot ...

term for

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

released under a very relaxed license (beerware licensed software). It provides the

end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product. The end user stands in contrast to users who support or maintain the product, such as sysops, system administrat ...

with the right to use a particular program (or do anything else with the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comment (computer programming), comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a Computer program, p ...

Description

Should the user of the product meet the author and consider the software useful, they are encouraged to either buy the author a

beer Beer is one of the oldest and the most widely consumed type of alcoholic drink in the world, and the third most popular drink overall after water and tea. It is produced by the brewing and fermentation of starches, mainly derived from cer ...

"in return" or drink one themselves. The Fedora project and Humanitarian-FOSS project at Trinity College recognized the ''"version 42"'' beerware license variant as extremely permissive "copyright only" license, and consider it as GPL compatible. the

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft ("s ...

does not mention this license explicitly, but its list of licenses contains an entry for informal licenses, which are listed as free, non-copyleft, and GPL-compatible. However, the FSF recommends the use of more detailed licenses over informal ones. Many variations on the beerware model have been created.

Poul-Henning Kamp Poul-Henning Kamp (; born 1966) is a Danish computer software developer known for work on various projects including FreeBSD and Varnish. He currently resides in Slagelse, Denmark. Involvement in the FreeBSD project Poul-Henning Kamp has been ...

's beerware license is simple and short, in contrast to the GPL, which he has described as a "joke". The full text of Kamp's license is: /* * ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42): * wrote this file. 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 beer in return. Poul-Henning Kamp * ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- */

References

{{software distribution Free and open-source software licenses Permissive software licenses Software licenses

Description

See also

References