[License-discuss] plain text license versions?

[Luis Villa]

On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 2:37 PM, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
> Is distribution of the *link* to the license sufficient compliance with this requirement?

For CC and MPL 2, yes.

MIT and many others? The conventional interpretation is "no."

Luis

> /Larry (from my tablet and brief)
>
> Luis Villa <luis at tieguy.org> wrote:
>
>>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