Communication skills

[Chris Travers]

On Nov 15, 2007 11:18 AM, Russ Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:

>
> I'm not sure you understand the problem, so I'll explain it again.
> Every license we approve imposes a cost on all software distributors,
> and on some software users.  A software distributor needs to read and
> understand every license for every software product they distribute.
> Some software users feel they need to read and understand every
> license for the software they use.  If there were two licenses which
> had *identical* terms, that doubles the cost of reading that license.

Speaking as a software distributor....

Pardon my confusion but how does license approval itself impose a cost
on software distributors?  Would use of licenses (whether FOSS or not)
impose that cost?

Obviously there are good reasons for keeping duplication including the
issue of confusion, but especially wrt BSD-style licenses, nothing
keeps people from listing a project on Sourceforge as BSD-licensed and
then using some non-standard variant.

Given the fact that these licenses are in use (and have been for some
time), it seems to me that the only real issue is one of clear
communication vs confusion.  (Obviously with new vanity licenses which
are not used in the wild, the issue of endorsing it to make it more
widespread does impose a cost on software distributors.

The key has more to do with reading the licenses of software you want
to distribute and not assuming that just because it says it is
licensed a certain way means that the license text says anything in
particular.

>
> A better solution would be to approve the "Simplified BSD / FreeBSD
> License".  I offer "SFBSD" as the short name.  Is that solution
> acceptable to you?

Almost exactly why I suggested above :-)  It neatly avoids the
confusion about whether a given license is actually approved or not.

Best Wishes
Chris Travers