Pay It Forward License
The Pay It Forward (PIF) License, an open-source license I authored in January 2025 that asks users to contribute back knowledge or value rather than fees, and its site payitforwardlicense.com built with Astro 5 and MDX. Published as v1.0 and used as the license on most of my later Tish-era repos.
- BPM
- 181
- GRADE
- B
- LEVEL
- 8
- RELEASES
- 1
- YEARS
- 2025–2025
Writing My Own License
On January 10, 2025 I started writing my own software license. Twelve days, tagged v1.0 on the 15th, with a site at payitforwardlicense.com built in Astro 5 and MDX, a foundation org to hold it, and a badge you can put on your project.
Instead of fees, the Pay It Forward License asks that you contribute back, in knowledge or in value, to the commons you took from. I'd gone back and forth on MIT versus GPL versus the source-available options for years, and this time I wrote what I actually wanted, with a nice page so people could read it.
PIF is the license on most of my Tish-era projects, so it ended up on the crates, the packages and the language itself. I stopped working on it on January 22.