License Proliferation

Sanjoy Mahajan sanjoy at mrao.cam.ac.uk
Thu Sep 1 00:30:15 UTC 2005


> http://www.osdl.org/newsroom/articles/License_Proliferation.pdf

External deployment is another item that needs to be sorted out: (1)
What counts as external deployment?  (2) Should it, whatever it is,
count as distribution and (for copyleft licenses) therefore trigger
the requirement to provide source?

About the 'all rights under all Berne-convention-based copyright laws'
(point 1): An important non-US right left out of most licenses is the
lending or rental right.  The Creative Commons internationalization
projects <http://creativecommons.org/worldwide/> might have a list of
all such rights.  Then there are annoying, minor rights such as
'copyright in typographical design' (which you violate by making a
photocopy), a stupidity of UK copyright law.

A standard attribution clause (point 7) depends whether or not the
license is copyleft.  With a copyleft license, source code is
provided, so I think a good solution (as taken by the OSL) is to
require giving attribution in the source code: Disk space is cheap.
With some academic licenses (e.g. BSD or MIT), you may not get source
code.  Then where should attributions go?  I don't know.

For point 3: Also get rid of most uses of 'herein'.

-Sanjoy



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