Politics-Free Licence ;)

[Smith, McCoy]

Isn't a choice of jurisdiction (and venue) clause necessarily a
political choice?  I.e., how likely is it that programmers in the
Western Hemisphere or in Asia are going to want to use this license, if
in order to enforce it they would need to retain counsel and file suit
in England/Wales?

It seems to me that if you want maximum uptake on an open source
license, you'd leave out jurisdiction and venue clauses.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Nicholas Cole [mailto:nicholas.cole at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2007 11:56 PM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: Politics-Free Licence ;)

I'm a licence newbie, I'm afraid.  Nothing in this email is intended
to start a flame-war!

I am neither a lawyer nor a programmer, but I have some python code I
want to release and was looking for suitable a "share and share alike"
licence for it.  I found it surprisingly hard.

The following licence is intended to have three features lacking (for
my purposes) in the GPL:

[1] It more clearly defines what a 'derived work' is.  Most of the FSF
discussion I could find concerned C code, and was in any case external
to the licence.  I've tried to codify what I take to be the common
position, and make it clear how this would apply to an interpreted
language.  It is this part of the licence I'm most interested in
getting feedback on.  I'm still not entirely happy with the wording.

[2] It specifies a jurisdiction.

[3] It is intended to be shorter than the GPL.  It doesn't contain the
preamble, and sticks to just defining the terms rather than explaining
their rationale.  I've therefore cheekily christened the licence the
"Politics Free Licence".  My major reason for doing this was just to
have a shorter, easier to read text.  Neither the name, nor this
aspect of the licence is intended to take sides in the ongoing flame
war on the Linux kernel mailling list. :)

Any feedback or suggestions would be very welcome.

Best wishes,

Nicholas

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