On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 12:28:03AM -0800, Rick Moen wrote: > [Moved to license-discuss, as this thread has become highly offtopic for > license-review.] > > Quoting Chad Perrin (per...@apotheon.com): > > > It doesn't help much that it seems like everyone working with lawyers > > wants to produce horribly complex systems of license restrictions, so > > that almost the only people who *can* read them are lawyers. > > (Cry me a river.) > > It's called 'realism'. The reason well written licences have an > irreducible complexity about them is that they are obliged to deal with > real legal issues, e.g., the way warranty disclaimers are required to be > specific and 'prominent' (which ends up meaning all capital letters) as > a result of Uniform Commercial Code caselaw.
Explain to me how wanting to enforce a crapton of additional terms is "realism" instead of "a more-restrictive license". I'm not talking about needing three lines to say what takes one in plain English: I'm talking about adding stuff like restrictions on deployment or distribution technologies, special-case license combination exceptions, and other stuff that would really be entirely unnecessary if people would just stop trying to micromanage each others' lives. > > Defective efforts like 'Unlicense' are what happens when naive coders > attempt to create permissive licences, with results about as sad and > unfortunate as would be the case if typical coders were to attempt to > practice law. . . . and yet, the Unlicense is lengthier than (for instance) the ISC and MIT/X11 licenses, which are better written from a legal standpoint. That's because the Unlicense is trying to *do* more, and not just because it wasn't written by lawyers or with lawyers on tap to help tighten up the language for legal purposes. -- Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
