Quoting David Woolley ([email protected]): > Rick Moen wrote: > > >It's called 'realism'. The reason well written licences have an > >irreducible complexity about them is that they are obliged to deal with > >real legal issues, e.g., the way warranty disclaimers are required to be > > The reality is that the people who have to comply with licences are > not professional lawyers. If they are presented with lots of > legalese, they are likely to ignore it, as most people do with > shrink wrap licence agreements, or the legal stuff hidden in low > contrast, small font links at the bottom of web pages, which the > designers would rather not have there at all.
1. The likes of MIT/X should be highly comprehensible as to their general purport by, say, school leavers, even if they gloss over many of the details and don't follow the nuances. 2. A large and underappreciated part of the value of well-known, major open source licences lies in the fact that they are broadly understood, and so do not need to be minutely scrutinised by everyone to understand what they're about. > I suspect that licences with lots of legalese discriminate against > medium size enterprises. Oh, bushwah. Any layman who wants to understand in even paranoid levels of detail the major licences and has two hours to spare can pull down the PDF of Larry Rosen's book free of charge, among other methods of arriving at that understanding. And any of them who cannot comprehend MIT/X after two hours even without Larry's book probably should rethink running a business. -- Cheers, Remember: "its" means "it is", and "it's" Rick Moen is the possessive form of "it". [email protected] -- FakeAPStylebook McQ! (4x80) _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
