click, click, boom

[M. Drew Streib]

On Wed, Sep 26, 2001 at 10:55:36AM -0400, Greg London wrote:
> With 26 licenses, some of them extremely long,
> most people will not read all of them,nor understand
> the implications of them. I skipped over to the
> OSD, read that, and assumed that I could pick
> any approved license, and the OSD would be enforced.

The OSI is not here to do your legal footwork for you. It _is_ here
to provide some guidelines for authors of licenses, and to enforce those
guidelines via an approval process.

I wouldn't normally say something like this, but I think it is warranted:

You are very deeply confused and undereducated about software licensing
in general, and are not bringing up anything that people on this list
aren't already aware of. On the contrary, you're mixing terms and getting
a few people upset. I don't fault you for this (yet), but _please_
do a little outside research on this whole subject and I think you'll
find answers to a lot of your questions.

I think that everyone is more than happy to debate the intricasies of
the OSD, and particulars of certain licenses, but there is a certain
minimum level of legal understanding and background knowledge that is
required. Blanket, unresearched statements don't contribute much.

-drew

-- 
M. Drew Streib <dtype at dtype.org> | http://dtype.org/
FSG <dtype at freestandards.org>    | Linux International <dtype at li.org>
freedb <dtype at freedb.org>        | SourceForge <dtype at sourceforge.net>
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