I want a widget with "Put this in your README.md" as a button at the top, and several tabs (/**/, <!-- -->, #, and a double-wide "More" that contains every other comment format) above a "And comment it in your code" line.

Selecting a mode from "More" will make the "More" tab single-width and put the selected comment character next to "More", where it will stay unless another "More" character is selected. (Alternately, it could just shuffle tabs around, bumping older selected characters off to the left or something like that.)

That widget is constructed by taking a textarea, replacing "(year)" in the first line with the current year, and then surrounding the existing text with whatever characters are in effect.

When switching, if the current mode is one with a prefix and suffix (like /**/), it will capture the string, with the prefix and the suffix (as optional, so they're ignored if missing), then make the replacements using the captured content. If the current mode is line-prefixed (like #), it will strip the prefix from each line.

Also, when switching into Markdown mode, it will add explicit <br>s at the end of each line, because two spaces at the end of the line should be chomped by any sane editor configuration.

It does all this on the existing text so users can change the "(copyright owners)" or whatever they want in the license, and users can copy in comments from their code to convert syntaxes.

I should refine and integrate this description (previously written on my private Trello card for this project) somewhere:

An easily-dropped-in and memorized license, for people who believe declarations in their jurisdiction don't need elaborate enumeration.

It's inspired by the terms of the MIT license, just with way fewer words.

No Version

The LITL is kept in a GitHub repository, but it's just a couple sentences. It's not magic, it's not code. It's just some suggested words for communicating a bigger idea. If those words change in a usage of the LITL, they change. That's just the version it is. There's no "canon".

No Illustrative Words

Why do we use long lists of illustrative words? There's a whole world outside the license: the law doesn't forget it when it looks at a piece of paper. The world is illustrative enough, and there are better ways to illustrate. Long lists just waste space trying to imitate exhaustive thinking. Lose them.

Terminology Rationale

The author's interpretation of what the words of the LITL are meant to mean- not a part of the license itself, but offered as rationale in the event of a dispute

The "freedom for any purpose" includes using the code without having to pay any patent dues to the author.

Please make it clear in the README that this isn't an open source software (OSS) license. For example, it doesn't grant the right to modify it, redistribute it, or redistribute a modified version - only to use it.