[License-discuss] plain text license versions?

[Lawrence Rosen]

Luis Villa asked:
> Have we (OSI) ever seriously adding putting plain text versions of 
> licenses (where available) to the OSI website?

While this makes no difference to the legal implications of a license,
converting to plain text destroys information useful for human beings to
comprehend the license. It is like removing indentation and line endings
from source code. Please don't encourage old-fashioned ways of representing
licenses so they can't be easily read by the only ones that matter: Human
beings.

This is part of my existential battle, including within Apache, to
acknowledge that HTML allows for a richer vocabulary of expression. Quit
down-versioning our creative works. :-) Does this qualify as a "historical?
technical? inertial? other?" reason in your lexicon? Whichever, why waste
time creating an 80-column ASCII format in this day and age? Some people, I
guess, still use punched cards for their software, but let's ignore their
needs.

My opinionated best regards,

/Larry


-----Original Message-----
From: Luis Villa [mailto:luis at tieguy.org] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2012 9:19 AM
To: License Discuss
Subject: [License-discuss] plain text license versions?

Have we (OSI) ever seriously adding putting plain text versions of licenses
(where available) to the OSI website? Just off the top of my head, Mozilla,
FSF, and Apache all provide both HTML and plain text versions of their
licenses, and I'm sure others must as well.

Seems like it would be useful for OSI to do this as well. That said, it
hasn't already been done, I'm guessing there is some reason (historical?
technical? inertial? other?) for it. Anyone know what that reason is?

Luis
_______________________________________________
License-discuss mailing list
License-discuss at opensource.org
http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss