On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Jack Lawson <ajacksif...@gmail.com> wrote: > Not to drag this on, but I wanted to say that agree with your sentiment; > that's why I stick with MIT: > > Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy > of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to > deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the > rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or > sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is > furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions > > MIT gets rid of the ambiguity that not having a license causes, while > providing that anyone can use the software with no restrictions.
Speaking as a retired lawyer, I'll have to disagree. As to ambiguity, just saying "MIT license" creates ambiguity because there are multiple MIT licenses and they differ. Wikipedia has a good discussion of that issue here. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit_license#Various_versions>. As to restrictions, your clip did not include the restriction that begins immediately after what you clipped: "The above copyright notice and this permission notice *shall be included* in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE." <tangent>Some of those warranties cannot lawfully be disclaimed in many U.S. jurisdictions and a disclaimer of liability for any "action in contract, tort, or otherwise" is without legal effect in any U.S. jurisdiction I've ever researched. It's to fool those who don't know better and a bluff so a lawyer who's handling the receiving end of a lawsuit has *something* to talk about. </tangent> Returning to the ambiguity topic, I've seen countless snippets and Lua libraries floating around the web where the author only states that the code is licensed under the "MIT license" instead of shipping a copy of the license with the code with the author's name and the library/snippet's name, so the author cannot even be identified, bringing to the fore the issue of whether the license was slapped onto the code by the author or someone who had no copyright to license. A good example is <snippets.luacode.org>, where all snippets are licensed in plain text only by a "License: MIT/X11" string, which at least has the decency to specify which MIT license the grant is under but happens not to be the license Lua is licensed under, which was probably the real intent. My favorites there are those linked from this page, <http://snippets.luacode.org/snippets/parseIni_142>, with an author identified only as "Anonymous User." And finally, there's the issue of clutter. The MIT Expat License (which Lua's developers borrowed but renamed as the Lua License), is a lot of extraneous metadata to require people to insert into that 5-line snippet they borrowed from your code. I'd feel differently if the license had been drafted so that it could be incorporated by a referencing URL to the license, rather than having to be included with the borrowing code. That way you could just add a single comment line to the snippet along the lines of: "-- snippet gratefully borrowed from Delano Developer pursuant to the terms of the Bit Conservation License, [url for author's web page that displays the license]." That way, you don't have to cram the snippet with legalese. I release all of my Lua code that I publish under the CC0 using the following snippet: "-- RIGHTS: This function's author, Paul E. Merrell, waives all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this function, pursuant to the Creative Commons CC0 Universal relinquishment of rights found at http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/"; Not as short as the Bit Conservation License reference, but close. :-) Copyright issues were a lot more simple in the U.S. until the U.S. ratified the Berne Convention (treaty) in 1988. Up until then, if copyright was not explicitly claimed in the work itself, along with the name, city, and state of the author, the work passed into the public domain automatically. Now even tweets and a child's note to another child sitting on the other side of the classroom are automatically copyrighted presumptively, with the copier bearing the burden of disproving the presumption. It's very bad law, grossly over-inclusive. BTW, to correct a misimpression in an earlier post, thorough research went into the CC0 waiver of rights and it is drafted to relinquish rights to the fullest extent allowed under any jurisdiction's law. It was drafted not to clash with any law. The odds of it being invalidated are slim to none, in my opinion. It's excellent legal draftsmanship and it relinquishes every copyright or neighboring right that can be relinquished wherever it may go. And it is as suitable for code as it is for any other "work" within the meaning of copyright law. All in my studied personal opinion, of course, a right to express that I regained when I resigned from the Bar Association and retired. This does not constitute legal advice, for which you should consult a lawyer licensed to practice. Best regards, Paul ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keep yourself connected to Go Parallel: INSIGHTS What's next for parallel hardware, programming and related areas? 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