Chris Nandor wrote:
>
>At 6:21 -0400 2000.09.12, Ben Tilly wrote:
> >I know some non-lawyers who could write a software license I
> >would trust. But I would not want to rely on a license
> >written by anyone who didn't not only know the above, but
> >who could not cite chapter and verse what those issues are.
>
>That's just silly. None of those issues were around when the BSD and MIT
>licenses were penned. They are very simple licenses that most any
>reasonable person could have written. None of them could cite chapter and
>verse what the issues are that you are referring to, because those issues
>were not around back then.
>
Actually some of them were.
But the BSD and MIT licenses are simple because they do not
attempt to do anything interesting. As I mentioned elsewhere,
the more concerned you are with control, the more you need to
worry about potential ways to circumvent that control. As
neither the BSD nor MIT licenses try to assert much control,
they can be simple.
The GPL by contrast is subtle and complex - because it tries
to assert a lot of specific control.
The AL should be somewhere in between. Hopefully much closer
to the BSD and MIT licenses than the GPL, but it needs to
take into account issues that the BSD and MIT licenses can
safely ignore.
>
> >If the lawyers are proposing documents that don't say what we
> >want, we can tell them we don't want them. But when it comes
> >to software licenses, the lawyers have a lot to say that it
> >would be very stupid to ignore.
>
>It would also be quite stupid to ignore the words of a post you are
>responding to. No less than three times in the very post you are
>responding to -- and even right there in the actual text you quoted -- I
>said that input from lawyers would be fine, but I would not want them to
>write the license. To say that I advocate "ignoring what lawyers have to
>say" is a mark of either disingenousness or carelessness.
Have you ever tried to write a computer program that your
client has, "Already written about 90% of, it just needs a
few touches."? If you have had that sad experience you
will almost certainly have had to tear it apart and rewrite
from scratch.
Well legal documents are similar.
Cheers,
Ben
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