[License-discuss] license information improvement project - now with a mockup!

[Luis Villa]

On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 1:23 PM, Engel Nyst <engel.nyst at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 11/06/2013 09:31 PM, Luis Villa wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 10:50 AM, Richard Fontana <fontana at sharpeleven.org
>> >wrote:
>>
>>> Maybe a link to the license steward's FAQ, if any (perhaps with some
>>>
>>> appropriate disclaimer that the OSI does not necessarily endorse
>>> anything in such FAQs)? This will only be relevant to a few licenses but
>>> some of them are among the more widely used ones.
>>>
>>
>>
>> Excellent point; added to the mockup.
>>
>> This somehow tipped it over the edge as too information-rich for me, so I
>> tried out another mockup, posted here for your comments:
>>
>> http://wiki.opensource.org/license_improvement_sample_alternate
>>
>>
> Oh, the alternate sample looks much cleaner to me. Sub-sections and simple
> lists make it readable and it's helpfully organized.
>

Great.


> I'm wondering though about the intended links to home and FAQ pages. I'm
> not sure the license homepage is different than what counts as FAQ, it
> seems they are different only for MPL and GPL. A license homepage is
> already rare, and sometimes it's precisely meant as FAQ.
>

I think it may be helpful to do a second sample for a "minimal" license
that has no FAQ, home page, etc., like
http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause


> If the license steward doesn't have a dedicated license page (other than
> the text), like EPL, the closest to a license homepage would be the legal
> page I assume...[1] However, it only has other Eclipse information and not
> about the license. I'm not sure it helps.
> I provisionally set EPL FAQ as homepage. I must misunderstand the
> intention of the homepage placeholder, in my attempt to take MPL's as
> example. MPL has a rich home. :)
>

No, I think in the EPL case, the FAQ is the right thing to link to. I think
the key thing is to have the "most informative page about the license that
is not the license itself"; whether that is a homepage or a FAQ doesn't
matter that much; if it is both, no harm there either.

Luis


>
> [1] http://www.eclipse.org/legal/
>
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