[License-discuss] FAQ entry for slight variations in licenses?

[dmg]

Hi Larry, everybody,

On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 7:44 PM, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
>
>
> As for the expense and nuisance of lawyers reviewing "trivial" modification
> in licenses, that's an education problem that OSI could address. Especially
> valuable would be them teaching people about the foolishness of having
> hundreds of variants on the BSD and MIT licenses that do almost nothing
> legally or practically different under copyright than the original licenses.

I think there is an opportunity to tell people: your license is not
exactly what it should be, so if possible, go an address it.

However, there is a potentially legacy issue too, where updating the
license might not be feasible.

Ultimately, I agree with Larry. The OSI is a position to say: variants
are not ok, don't modify licenses to replace words or sentences that
you think are obviously equivalent (such as "program" and "programme"
or the more challenging one replacing the "contributors" with their
own name). And of course, don't add/remove entire sentences (like it
is the case with MIT/X11, a total mess!!)


-- 
--dmg

---
Daniel M. German
http://turingmachine.org