License Wizard

[Mike Wattier]

Hi,

>On Friday 08 April 2005 5:19 am, Brian O'Byrne wrote:
> It seems to me that creating a complete and closed tree of questions
> is a horrendously complex task, and will be difficult to maintain as
> new licenses come on stream.

and does nothing to communicate the true "general concensus". It seems that 
putting a nice front end on a "wizard" that only returns a hard coded set of 
results is a bit un-democratic and can not really be trusted to help make a 
"decision" based on the widest cross section of available input.

why not provide an interface where the "legal" folks can provide their input 
and assign their own "weight" to each license/question/attribute via a web 
form, still using your -100/100 scale, then open this up to the public. 

License attributes can then, i think as previously mentioned, examined side by 
side in a matrix view, but with scores and the scoring methods exposed point 
by point. 

Obvious "score rigging" can be tossed out by ignoring high/low scores.  This 
would enable the user to get more of an "Average" of the views out there and 
provide better insight into the concensus of the industry at any given time. 
Lawyer type users can maintain an account and revise their opinions and 
re-weight attributes over time. You could still exert a certain amount of 
control over the input of the weight.. eg.. only "approved" lawyers / legal 
minds are used in the calculation. 

I'm surprised the OSI has never commissioned something like this. The 
possibilities for this are endless and it's not that hard to do. Might be a 
cool project, whatever the design decision result, if php is the language of 
choice I would gladly donate code and  consultation to the effort. Why don't 
you start something on one of the project sites and let the community 
participate, I'll bet it gets done pretty quickly, there are lots of talented 
software developers out there who would like to understand all this a lot 
better than they do. This could help.

have a great day
Mike