Writing cool software is way too hard.

And that's why swizzy.org was founded: to help make it easier to write software with a high coolness quotient. By providing tools to simplify the development process, we hope to make exceptional software as commonplace as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee[1] (or whatever is commonplace in your neck of the galaxy.)

To encourage people to use these tools, we decided to start by making our software license easier to use. After careful crafting, we came up with the following very simple license agreement:

Swizzy License Agreement

Copyright (C) 1999 - 2002 Swizzy.org. All Rights Reserved.

This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the use of or inability to use this software.

Permission is granted to anyone to use, modify, or redistribute this software for any purpose, including commercial applications, so long as the following four conditions are met:

1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not claim that you wrote the original source code. If you use this software in a product, an acknowledgement in the product documentation would be appreciated but is not required.

2. Altered versions of the original source code must be plainly marked as such and must not be misrepresented as being the original software.
   

3. The names "Swizzy" and "L" must not be used to endorse or promote any products or distributions derived from this software without prior written permission of Swizzy.org.

4. This agreement must not be removed from or altered in any source files or distribution.

So how do we make money doing this? Well, we don't. For us, swizzy.org is a labor of love, and a way to give back to the programming community... <sniff>... Touching, I know... but true. (We do however have some shareware offerings that help us keep our freeware development going. Please check them out!)

Our first effort is a new programming language called (simply enough) L. You can read about it and download a compiler for it here (or via the link in the navigation bar to the left.)

1. From Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.