Communication skills

[Donovan Hawkins]

> Dag-Erling Smørgrav writes: 
> 
> Yes, and a
large number of web pages link "miserable
>
failure" to the White House's bio of George W. Bush. I
> don't think any reasonable person would take that
as
> evidence that he is one. 

No, it is
evidence that the people doing the linking
consider him one.


>> The over 14,000 Google hits for "freebsd
license" at
>> least demonstrates that it is not
something Russ
>> invented. 
> 
> So you
consider "Sun revokes FreeBSD license for
> Java"
as an example of the use of the name
> "FreeBSD
License"? 

No, I consider it background noise. See my
other post
where I compare the counts to other names for the
license...you could reduce that 14,000 by half to account
for noise
and it would still be far above anything else.

If you read a
few pages of the hits, it will become
abundantly clear that the term
is used exactly the same
way other license names are used.


> And you consider the use of "FreeBSD License" by
> random third parties not affiliated with the FreeBSD
> Project as evidence that the FreeBSD Project uses
> and endorses that name? 

Not sure that the
FSF's license list counts as a
"random third party", but
no...I consider it evidence
that the term is in use in the wild as
the name for
that piece of text. Thus Russ did not invent the term
as you would have us believe (or he invented it
some time ago and
it has become very popular).

As for what name *should* be used,
I disagree
strongly with calling BSD variants the
"N-clause
Permissive License". Every permissive
license
could be called an N-clause permissive license
(for suitable values of N), and no one license
should
be given such a special distinction as
being *the* Permissive
License. I would have
a similar problem with the "Short
Copyleft
License" or the "Best Academic
License".

Donovan