On Tue, Jan 18, 2000 at 08:31:58AM -0500, Deb Richardson wrote: > I think that this is an extremely bad idea. Having more licenses, > particularly those like the OPL and the new FSF licenses, is a good > thing. Having only one license doesn't do much for an author's "freedom > of choice", really, particularly when you're talking about removing the > aspects of the OPL that make it so attractive in many situations.
I disagree. License proliferation is a big problem for two reasons: 1) Most programmers, and authors, are not sholars in copyright law. Given the opportunity to draft their own license from scratch, or apply carte blanche modifications to an existing one, they are likely to permit things they didn't intend, forbid things they didn't intend, or render the license legally meaningless due to internal contradictions -- in which case it reverts to the default state of "All Rights Reserved." 2) It leads to literally mountainous headaches when people attempt to mix-and-match pieces of works under differing licenses. While it perhaps is appropriate to permit proliferation among almost entirely artistic works like the Great American Novel[1], it is generally bad when it happens to works whose function is modular and "practical", such as pieces of source code. That said, discouraging license proliferation is not the same as asserting that there is Only One True License. It is best to have a small set of licenses -- perhaps two to four -- whose ramifications are well understood by at least a significant minority of the community at large. The more licenses you have, the harder this general understanding is to achieve. I do not, unfortunately, think it has yet been accomplished in the arena of free software. I regularly see the most amazing falsehoods uttered with conviction about the GPL and its ramifications (just today, in fact, on the XFree86 developers' mailing list). More and more licenses are not going to fix this, they are just going to leave ordinary laymen ultimately feeling incompetent to evaluate licenses. This is good only for attorneys; not for authors or programmers. Moreover, license proliferation promotes an "every man for himself" attitude which is, I think, contrary to the spirit of sharing and community-building which I perceive to be one of the enterprises of the Free Software and Open Content communities. People do have the right to be hermits, so to speak, but if they invest so little trust in people generally to redistribute (and modify, if applicable) their works, then they, and we, are better off if they just slap the "All Rights Reserved" boilerplate on their work rather than beating around the bush. No license is perfectly enforceable, anyway, so let's not kid ourselves that we can micromanage the consumers of our works. > I, as an author, would very much like to be able to choose whether > others are allowed to modify my released documents or not. I would also > like to be able to choose who has and hasn't print publication rights. > Granted, restricting print publication rights is a very serious > restriction. Documents licensed under such restrictions are not > appropriate for the Open Source Writers Group project (you can read our > Licensing Policy at http://www.oswg.org/docs/about.html). As an author, > however, I would very much like to have that choice. More importantly, > the ability to restrict modifications is very important to me. If I > release a paper or essay, for example, I would like to control who makes > modifications and what modifications are made. Well, essays that Richard Stallman, for instance, writes have a very simple, clear, and easy to understand license. "Verbatim copying in any medium is permitted." This solves the problem of editorial control right there -- if you want to see his essay changed a particular way, you'd better contact him and he'll do so if he agrees with you. On the other hand, I think the battle of conventional paper printing rights is ultimately unwinnable, at least on the license front. All this business about "the original publisher's name must appear in larger print than anything else" sounds like an effort by some cynical publishing house[2] to get free advertising on the backs of well-meaning authors. I think it is likely that, on the artistic side of the fence, there are going to me so many varied preferences about publication that it is better not to attempt a one-size-fits-all strategy. If you'd like to be able to choose who has and hasn't print publication rights, let's leave it out of the license. Let what should be personally negotiated stay that way. My personal hope is that, in the future, authors of both artistic and technical works will gain enough leverage that we will see a lot more copyright retention by the authors instead of publishing houses. I would like to think that ensuring free electronic distribution forever will help get us there, but I am not at all sure that it will. In any case, I think it is a value that stands on its own merits[3]. > Technical documentation is a different story. I agree that Open Content > technical documentation should, whereever possible, be released under a > license that allows for free distribution, modification, and > publication. But technical documentation is only one catagory of the > documents that could possibly be covered by the Open Publication > License. The OPL is, in my opinion, an excellent foundation for a more > generally usable license. Well, up to the point about license options, I agree. I think the exercise of either of those options changes the nature of the license so much that they should really be separated into a separate license. It would be convenient if most people who elect to exercise *either* of the options have, in practice, typically exercised both. This would make it possible to restrict ourselves to only two licenses. OPL without the options, and some as-yet-unnamed license with both "inlined" instead of optional. I won't, however, pretend to know any statisics that back up or refute my hopeful thesis. > It also has to be accepted that not everyone is going to release their > documents under a license that is acceptable to everyone. That's just > part of the game. We cannot _force_ authors to release their docs under > a certain license (or at all, for that matter), so why would we work to > eliminate valid licensing options in an effort to create a single > license? It's simply non-sensical, and completely goes against the > whole idea of "freedom" in terms of allowing an author's freedom of > choice. I think attempting to come up with one license to solve two very different classes of problems is doomed to failure. There is simply too much distinction between the purpose, style, and emotional investment made by author of a poem or novel as contrasted with the author of a Unix manual page. There are exceptions on both sides, of course -- but with a dual-license strategy, such exceptional people can simply elect to choose the "other" license. Finally, in my (limited compared to many participating in this discussion) experience, you don't get very far talking about freedom in the context of whose gets preserved and whose gets limited. Anyone who has seen a BSD/GPL flamewar can probably attest to this. I won't even attempt to rehash the different perspectives here. I strongly believe that a far more effective approach to licensing takes the form of a set of questions: "do you want people to be able to do X? Do you mind if Y happens?", and not some open-ended query like that asked of a Miss America Pageant contestant. A BSD advocate and a GPL advocate can both talk about promoting "freedom" and mean very different things. The best way to avoid these kinds of meme wars is to prevent them in the first place, and that means no "one size fits all" solutions. It is a fine line between oversimplification and proliferation. My assessment, based upon only a few years of participating in the free software community, is that we need no more licenses that we can count on one hand, and that, if we're going to propose multiple licenses at once, we need to consider the ramifications of people trying to intermix works under each of them. Determining how many possible intermixtures there are is a simple problem of combinatorics. How many can the average person keep in his or her head? -- that is perhaps the best gauge. People will, ultimately, attempt to do something you do not anticipate. If you systematically exhaust the possibilities in advance (no matter how unlikely you think some of them at the time), you stand a much better chance of drafting good licenses from the outset. Furthermore, you can identify at the very beginning what admixtures simply won't be allowed...say so unhesitatingly, and that will spare us all headaches down the road. Sorry for the length of this message. I've been ruminating about these issues for a while; hopefully I am able to contribute a worthwhile perspective. [1] Knuth's _TACP_ might be considered a strongly artistic work despite its highly technical content; this just illustrates that one man's art is another man's recipe, and is why I am in favor of letting the author choose one side of the fence or the other. (For that matter, I see no reason an author could not delimit sections -- even paragraphs -- of the same work under alternating licenses, if he or she is prepared for that degree of tedium.) [2] Can anyone tell me whose idea that was? I'd love to know. I have my suspicions but I'll keep my slanderous speculations to myself. :) [3] shorthand for the dogmatic phrase ("axiomatic, self-evident Good Thing") :) -- G. Branden Robinson | Never underestimate the power of human Debian GNU/Linux | stupidity. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | -- Robert Heinlein roger.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ |
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