I love it how developers talk about legal issues as if they were software issues: license compatibility, backward compatibility, dual- licensing, license interop, adherence to license clauses, migration to a different license, forking of licenses, license features, supporting a license or license requirements, license names with Three-Letter- Acronyms, version numbers, and even the way developers declare their licenses at the beginning of sources files. It's all there in any license flame war populated by software developers.
Free software licenses are a convention or a trend of open source projects. Who said an OS project must have a license? Sure it's convenient when one is really needed or if you really want to virally and forcefully push your agenda onto others, but for most free projects, if you just let them loose, there really are no issues of liability, copyright, trademarks, patents, code mixing, tainted code, distribution rights or even credits. It may seem there are issues thanks to the verbose legal gobbledygook licenses are written in, but really it's all bull. Now, I'm not a lawyer, nor I play one on TV, but the truth is software developers know about legal issues as much as legal professionals know about software. One effect of this, is paralysis. Remember when you needed to deal with something awfully bureaucratic, and you just put it off? Same thing happens when people are faced with a difficult dilemma, they avoid it. People see licenses, and immediately enter a moral dilemma -- should they ignore the will of the developer and possibly break the law or should they pay a lawyer? Which is the greater sin? Lispers were always avant-garde, ignoring convention, only considering merit. Why can't we debate whether a license is needed at all for a free project? It's like inventing a new programming language and debating how you should retrofit it with OOP features because all the other cool languages do it. Mibu (Too idealistic? Hey, it's a flame war. Just playing by the rules...) --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
