Forrest, You raise a good and important issue. There is a reason why I use legal terms of art in my licenses, but I owe you an explanation of that.
As a lawyer drafting a license that at least purports to represent the concensus views of the open source community, I clearly have to get buy-in from my own "clients" to what I'm doing. (Please: I mean "client" in the colloquial sense. The only formal client I represent here is Open Source Initiative.) Communicating in my clients' language is important. But at the same time I must write for enforceability. I must do my best to make sure that other attorneys and the courts will clearly understand what I mean by every word I use. In that, I am speaking to a non-geek audience. That legal audience is trained in legal terminology that I must use precisely. When I use language copied from a statute, I am not suggesting that it is the most easily understood expression of what we in the geek community intend. The word "prepare," for example, doesn't mean precisely the same thing as the word "create," and perhaps geeks think it makes more sense to say "create." But the real reader of an open source license is another lawyer who is going to advise his client what that word means. If I use the word "prepare," just as the Congress did when it wrote the Copyright Act, and just as the federal courts do when they decide copyright cases, other lawyers will know exactly what I mean. They will know that they can turn to the statutory and case law in the Licensor's jurisdiction to know what the OSL means. And if there is no legal history available to assist in interpretation of the OSL, we're at least no worse off than we are with the GPL, which is to be strictly interpreted under the meanings of the Copyright Act. I'm using language from the Copyright Act on purpose. That isn't always true for open source licenses and that concerns me. Some licenses are downright ambiguous and imprecise. I'm trying not to be. I will tell you also, although this is not intended as legal advice because you are not my client, that I would advise any client who was concerned that he was "creating" rather than "preparing," that he not worry about the distinction. In that respect, the OSL will almost certainly be interpreted by the courts the way my geek friend wants it to be. In any event, that's why I did what I did, and I'm not changing the word "prepare" just 'cause someone doesn't like it. /Larry P.S. Not to say that all words in the OSL are precise. Several people have already suggested subtle word changes (and deletions) from earlier versions of the license that really did improve the license enormously. I value suggestions, but I don't always accept them. /LR > ----------- > BTW, request for approval after very recent changes is a poor > idea from a "release engineering" perspective. What's the rush? I feel a slight rush. We've been talking about OSL 1.1 on license-discuss for over a month now and I've simply been incorporating good suggestions made by lots of people. The license has been submitted to several companies' attorneys for review and we've considered (and in one important situation accepted) one company's suggestions for changes. The OSI board of directors has spent many hours discussing its provisions. Nobody has even suggested that the license isn't OSD compatible. It's enough better than the currently-approved version that I'd like to discourage people from using the old version. So why not get on with it? /Larry -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
