On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 04:50:16PM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote: > On 02/26/2012 02:31 PM, David Woolley wrote: > > > >The reality is that the people who have to comply with licences > >are not professional lawyers. > This is always in my thoughts when considering any Open Source license. > > We can fail these people in two ways: > 1. Provide them with a license that they might not understand. > 2. Provide them with a license that won't hold up in court. > > The second damages them more. The first can be solved with > explanation separate from the license.
. . . which, judging by some Creative Commons examples (as the most obvious case of a license author/organization taking exactly that approach), is prone to being misleading and/or incomplete. Legal rigor is good, but pages of dense legalese coupled with "plain English" explanations that give people mistaken impressions because it's just not reasonable to expect a nuanced understanding of the sheer complexity of the license suggests to me that there's something wrong. What's wrong is usually the metric crapton of terms heaped on such licenses. I suspect a better approach to understandable, legally well-formed license production might be to get someone who wants a very simple license to write it, and only *then* get the lawyers involved. While you're at it, be prepared to make the lawyers explain everything they want to change, and to tell them "no" a lot. -- Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
