On Mon, 10 May 1999, Kevin Shrieve wrote:
> Have you given thought to whether you'd use the license at
> http://www.opencontent.org/ ?
No, never. The license was not written with the aid of a lawyer, and the
people who made this license refuse to discuss improving it. (They did at
first, when they first announced it -- it was not a copyleft but just
allowed people to make copies of works that were put under that license;
now, however, they do not even answer their mail.)
The problem is that they can change the terms of the license at any time,
changing the terms of all works net-published under the terms of this
license, so you have to trust them enough to use their license. You could
keep a local copy of the license rather than a link to their site, but still
the license does not appear to be useable. The FSF looked at it and
came to the same conclusion; they now use the GPL for non-software
information as well as program source code, including their manuals:
<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonsoftware-copyleft.html>
>From time to time there have been people who have said that, if challenged,
even the GNU GPL may not hold up in court. However, many lawyers have
reviewed the GPL, it has been and is used for non-software information, we
can always be assured that the FSF will always provide assistance to uphold
it, and they will always make sure that all future versions of the GPL will
be a copyleft license.
