[License-discuss] Newbie post: Localisable open source software license

[ChanMaxthon]

Those CC licenses are indeed interchangeable l10ns, if it have the same properties. They also have special clause in the licenses to permit interchanging l10ns of the license in the actual legal code. Example: CC-by 3.0 China (in Simplified Chinese, on top of Chinese laws) versus CC-by 3.0 United States (in English, on top of US laws) versus CC-by 3.0 Unported (in English, on top of UN-administered international treaties)

What I am trying here is to add similar clauses into open source licenses for software, making it similarly localizable. I will also include a single-direction relicensing clause converting the localizable variant to its base license. My current project is an l10n-3BSDL, will also have l10n-2BSDL (converts down to both 2-clause BSDL and MIT), l10n-Apache2, l10n-LGPL3 and l10n-GPL3 forks.

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> On 2013年10月21日, at 21:29, David Woolley <forums at david-woolley.me.uk> wrote:
> 
>> On 21/10/13 07:39, Maxthon Chan wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> There is a project, Creative Commons, that focuses on providing free
>> license for art, music and works alike. They tackled the localisation
>> issue well, by providing localised licenses that is interchangeable with
> 
> No they don't.  All the licences seem to be in English.  What is localised is the lay person's summary of the licence.  E.g., the Chinese summary of CC-BY-SA, is <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.zh>, but the first link on that page (法律文本（许可协议全文）), <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode>, points to the English language text of the actual licence.
> 
>> each other, even in the copyleft variants.However Creative Commons does
>> not work well with software. I can CC license my documentations but not
>> the software itself.
> 
>> I would like to know your opinions on a localisable open source license.
> 
> In general, a translation of a licence is a different licence, because one cannot exactly translate from one language to another.  In fact, one could probably argue that choice of law needs to be specified, as well.
> 
> Although Creative Commons have chosen to create the lay versions of the licence, I suspect many open source drafters would not want to do so, because users might believe that the summary is the licence.
> 
> 
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