[License-discuss] plain text license versions?

Luis Villa luis at tieguy.org
Thu Sep 6 21:21:27 UTC 2012


On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 12:14 PM, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
> Karl Fogel wrote:
>> Many coders expect to find plaintext license terms in a LICENSE or
>> COPYING file, directly in the source tree.
>
> I'd count that as another reason *not* to provide plain text license files. I think it would be FAR more useful to have a simple license statement in the source tree of each program that points to the OFFICIAL version of that license on the OSI website. This also avoids the duplication of text -- with potential transcription or legal errors -- in many source code trees, and completely avoids the need to actually read the licenses if one trusts OSI.
>
> Doesn't CC do that, in a way, with their license logos?

More specifically, CC does it with the requirement in the license that
attribution notices link to the canonical text. Many OSS software
licenses, unfortunately, require distribution of the actual text of
the license.

Luis



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