Karl Fogel wrote: > Many coders expect to find plaintext license terms in a LICENSE or > COPYING file, directly in the source tree.
I'd count that as another reason *not* to provide plain text license files. I think it would be FAR more useful to have a simple license statement in the source tree of each program that points to the OFFICIAL version of that license on the OSI website. This also avoids the duplication of text -- with potential transcription or legal errors -- in many source code trees, and completely avoids the need to actually read the licenses if one trusts OSI. Doesn't CC do that, in a way, with their license logos? /Larry -----Original Message----- From: Karl Fogel [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2012 8:09 AM To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [License-discuss] plain text license versions? "Lawrence Rosen" <[email protected]> writes: >> Have we (OSI) ever seriously adding putting plain text versions of >> licenses (where available) to the OSI website? > >While this makes no difference to the legal implications of a license, >converting to plain text destroys information useful for human beings >to comprehend the license. It is like removing indentation and line >endings from source code. Please don't encourage old-fashioned ways of >representing licenses so they can't be easily read by the only ones >that matter: Human beings. > >This is part of my existential battle, including within Apache, to >acknowledge that HTML allows for a richer vocabulary of expression. >Quit down-versioning our creative works. :-) Does this qualify as a >"historical? >technical? inertial? other?" reason in your lexicon? Whichever, why >waste time creating an 80-column ASCII format in this day and age? Some >people, I guess, still use punched cards for their software, but let's >ignore their needs. Actually, I think we should provide plain text versions. (See http://projects.opensource.org/redmine/issues/8, which is about this.) Many coders expect to find plaintext license terms in a LICENSE or COPYING file, directly in the source tree. While they can of course still understand the text if it's in HTML, they prefer plain text -- and their editor software will often display HTML as raw markup rather than as a pretty page. So there's a very relevant group who want & expect plain text versions. When we don't provide those versions, those people sometimes manually reformat our HTML pages [1] in order to produce a plaintext file, occasionally introducing errors or at least inconsistencies. It's better if we just provide canonical versions. Karl [1] I have had to do this on more than one occasion. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
