[License-discuss] Shortest copyleft licence

[Rick Moen]

In case the point wasn't clear:

> You're right; it would be a good thing if someone skilled in the art
> were to attempt that.  Short summaries of existing licences would be a
> fine start, though I could swear that there have been a few.
> 
> It should be remembered that the CC 'human-readable' summaries are not
> the operative texts, though.

Like the other CC licences,
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ stresses at the top:

  This is a human-readable summary of (and not a substitute for) the
  license.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode has the
operative text.  After copying and pasting from the title 'Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License' through
the end of concluding Section 8 (just above the greyed-text notices)
into a 80-column text file:

$ wc cc-by-sa-4.0 
  233  2144 13982 cc-by-sa-4.0
$

233 lines, 2144 words or word-like text blocks, 14kB of text.


For comparison's sake, taking http://opensource.org/licenses/GPL-2.0 and
removing the preamble (legal NOOP irrespective of claims it's essential
blah-blah), the four lines of notices below the title, and the 'How to
Apply' instruction at the bottom:

$ wc gplv2 
  204  2023 12095 gplv2
$

204 lines, 2023 words or word-like text blocks, 12kB of text.

(The four lines of notices _are_ esential to the licence, but I 
was trying to create a direct comparison omitting the same small legal
metadata from both.)