Machine-readable licenses?

[Andrea Chiarelli]

Yes, Gervase.
I'm looking for a way to describe software licenses in order to simplify 
their understanding for not lawyer people.
Something similar to CC REL (http://www.w3.org/Submission/ccREL/) for 
Creative Commons licenses.
Obviously it does not substitute license text, but should give an overview 
of license's permissions and prohibitions.

Regards

Andrea

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gervase Markham" <gerv-gmane at gerv.net>
To: <license-discuss at opensource.org>
Sent: Monday, September 27, 2010 1:05 PM
Subject: Re: Machine-readable licenses?


> On 22/09/10 09:28, Andrea Chiarelli wrote:
>> license. This can be done putting an identifier of a license from a list
>> of common licenses
>
> That sounds like "a machine-readable language describing open source 
> software licences" to me. But perhaps I misunderstood your question.
>
> Are you looking to take each possible legal provision and encode it in 
> some machine-readable form?
>
> E.g.
>
> BSD = ALL_RIGHTS_RESERVED + FREE + RETAIN_NOTICES_IN_SOURCE + 
> RETAIN_NOTICES_IN_DOCS + NO_ENDORSEMENT + NO_WARRANTY?
>
> If so, I don't think you will succeed. If it were possible to make legal 
> documents that simple, they'd be that simple :-)
>
> Gerv
>