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

Rick Moen rick at linuxmafia.com
Tue Feb 28 18:44:42 UTC 2012


Quoting Chris Travers (chris at metatrontech.com):

> Any layman who wants to understand why this doesn't work needs only to
> pick up any of Derrida's books at the corner used book store.....

Anyone who cannot distinguish between the accessibility of Larry Rosen's
extremely lucid work and Jacques Derrida's ridiculously obscure text has
much bigger problems.

However, as a reminder, it is _not_ necessary to read a comprehensive
book on open source licensing to have a reasonable knowledge of how a
major open source licence, particularly a simple permissive one, is
constructed and why.

> All human communication is subject to areas of ambiguity and
> irreducible complexity.  The more you try to specify, the more you
> will run into conflicts and omissions.

Thank you, Captain Edge Case.

> And as much as folks like to pretend that legalese is a programming
> language, it's not.

I hope you're addressing this bit of packaged Polonius-grade wisdom to
someone else, as I certainly have had no such illusion.  How many times
have I said on this mailing list that the law (and judges) are not
Turing machines?  Let's find out.

~ $ grep 'Turing machine' Mail/license-discuss
law is a Turing machine.
The difference is that judges are not Turing machines.  
ObReminder:  The law is not a Turing machine:  Judges interpret terms
anything that looks like a Turing machine against a variety of inputs.  
Turing machine, with the result that they try to hurl goofy licences 
As has been said in this space before, judges are not Turing machines,
like the fact that a Turing machine cannot be set up to decide what is a
$

Eight times, if you include this posting.




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