The coffee license

Published 2025-10-14

I love simple things. Even better: simple solutions to complex problems. One such problem is that of software licenses.

The first place most developers encounter software licenses is maybe NPM or GitHub. Almost every package or repository has a license attached to it, be it MIT, ISC, Apache or GPL. Some even have two licenses. Why would you want two licenses? Well, because some licenses are not combatible with others, some licenses don’t handle patent right explicitly, and some people just don’t like some licenses.

So if you want to publish something you made in a way, where others can iterate on your progress, you have to decide on a particular license, or set of licenses. MIT and ISC are pretty common and allow for almost everything. Some projects require the Apache License 2.0, so we can dual-license if we need to. But Gnu recommends the GPL, and GPL is only compatible with GPL, but not all versions of GPL, so we need to think of that. But some people don’t like the MIT license and prefer the ISC license, which is shorter. Others don’t like the Apache license. Some projects prefer one of the BSD licenses, but others want a more restrictive license.

This is a mess. We now know clearly, that we don’t know clearly what the right license is. There must be a better way…

¶ Public domain

The easy solution is to put your code in the public domain. The Unlicense is a common way to do that, but not the only way. SQLite famously is in the public domain, which is part of why it’s the most deployed piece of software in the world. By putting your work in the public domain, you opt out of copyright and licensing politics and allow anyone to do anything with your work. It’s the easiest and most bestest solution™ - in my opinion.

But then i found this:

"THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
<phk@FreeBSD.ORG> 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

The beerware license. I was very inspired by this, and wanted to adopt it too. But i don’t drink beer, i drink coffee. I also don’t want to require preservation of license notices. And that’s how the coffee-license was born. It serves no real purpose, it solves no real problems, but it makes me happy.

So if you want to put your work in the public domain, and you like coffee too, you can use the coffee-license to do so.