[License-discuss] Does this look like an open source license?

[Ben Cotton]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 5:43 AM, David Woolley
<forums at david-woolley.me.uk> wrote:
>
> This sounds like a recipe for licence proliferation.

It definitely is, but new licenses aren't always a problem,
particularly in cases where a judge's inability to understand the
language renders the license effectively invalid.

Just for fun, I started from the BSD 3-Clause and re-worked it to only
use the words in the Oxford 3000 word list (plus the word "copyright",
since that seemed unavoidable). This is almost certainly not a usable
license from a legal perspective, due to the amount of synonyms and
circumlocution I had to employ (on the other hand, just because a word
has a specific legal meaning in the U.S., that doesn't mean it will in
other countries).

The text of the license is on GitHub:
https://github.com/funnelfiasco/permissive3000

The commit history contains most of the reasoning for the various
changes I made, but I've also discussed some of it on a blog post:
http://blog.funnelfiasco.com/?p=1638

I have no intention of submitting this for OSI approval (unless it
turns out that this is really awesome), but it seems like a good focal
point for discussion about making licenses as readable and portable
(from a language standpoint if not a jursidiction standpoint). I
welcome constructive feedback as a public learning experience, but if
this is too far off-topic for this list, I'd be happy to move the
discussion to another venue.


Thanks,
BC

-- 
Ben Cotton