[License-discuss] Draft of new OSI licenses landing page; please review.

[Lawrence Rosen]

Karl Fogel wrote:
> It makes sense to tune the page toward one special kind of visitor: a
> person who doesn't know much about licenses, doesn't feel the need to
> get expert help, and is just going to pick one.

I would probably recommend to someone who doesn't really care about his
copyright other than to give it away to use CC0 or the BSD license. I'd even
sign that as the opinion of an open source expert although I'd thoroughly
disclaim it as legal advice!

That's a cheap recommendation, and worth what you all paid for it.

I'm definitely not prepared to recommend the GPL without a good deal more
information about the visitor to the website. Neither should OSI.

/Larry



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Karl Fogel [mailto:kfogel at red-bean.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2012 4:28 PM
> To: license-discuss at opensource.org
> Subject: Re: [License-discuss] Draft of new OSI licenses landing page;
> please review.
> 
> Michael Bernstein <michael at fandomhome.com> writes:
> >OSI might even document various well-known reasons to use licenses
> >other than the ones recommended by OSI.
> 
> We could, but that to me feels like going down the slippery slope.
> 
> It makes sense to tune the page toward one special kind of visitor: a
> person who doesn't know much about licenses, doesn't feel the need to
> get expert help, and is just going to pick one.
> 
> Every other kind of person is too complicated for us to give guidance
> to
> (Larry's point, basically, which for this set of people I entirely
> agree
> with).  For them, the page is a reference, not a recommendation source.
> 
> By the way, and not that you were suggesting this, it doesn't work to
> say to every visitor "You should get expert help."  That's nice, but
> they won't -- it's not possible in many cases, and it's their
> responsibility to judge whether it is in their case.
> 
> If a lot of VC money is on the line, you can bet they have a lawyer.
> But if it's somebody's one-off script they wrote late one night and now
> want to share, then they don't need a lawyer, they just need to pick a
> license from the first group and release their script.
> 
> -K
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