[License-discuss] plain text license versions?

[Luis Villa]

On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 3:58 PM, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
> That's unfortunate, because I advise it all the time for all licenses. Anything more is a waste of time. And my clients have never been sued for posting a link instead of a license. Maybe we are lucky???

The problem is not that you'll be sued for a technical violation. The
problem is that when you are sued (or threatened with suit) for some
more substantive violation, all your technical violations will be used
to insinuate bad faith. Perhaps your clients have such spotless
reputations and/or are so perfect in their substantive compliance that
they aren't concerned about that, though :)

Luis

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