[License-discuss] [License-review] CC withdrawl of CC0 from OSI process

[Chad Perrin]

On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 12:28:03AM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> [Moved to license-discuss, as this thread has become highly offtopic for
> license-review.]
> 
> Quoting Chad Perrin (perrin at apotheon.com):
> 
> > It doesn't help much that it seems like everyone working with lawyers
> > wants to produce horribly complex systems of license restrictions, so
> > that almost the only people who *can* read them are lawyers.
> 
> (Cry me a river.)
> 
> It's called 'realism'.   The reason well written licences have an
> irreducible complexity about them is that they are obliged to deal with
> real legal issues, e.g., the way warranty disclaimers are required to be
> specific and 'prominent' (which ends up meaning all capital letters) as
> a result of Uniform Commercial Code caselaw.

Explain to me how wanting to enforce a crapton of additional terms is
"realism" instead of "a more-restrictive license".  I'm not talking about
needing three lines to say what takes one in plain English: I'm talking
about adding stuff like restrictions on deployment or distribution
technologies, special-case license combination exceptions, and other
stuff that would really be entirely unnecessary if people would just stop
trying to micromanage each others' lives.


> 
> Defective efforts like 'Unlicense' are what happens when naive coders
> attempt to create permissive licences, with results about as sad and
> unfortunate as would be the case if typical coders were to attempt to
> practice law.

. . . and yet, the Unlicense is lengthier than (for instance) the ISC and
MIT/X11 licenses, which are better written from a legal standpoint.
That's because the Unlicense is trying to *do* more, and not just because
it wasn't written by lawyers or with lawyers on tap to help tighten up
the language for legal purposes.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]