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

[Tom Callaway]

On 01/26/2015 08:42 AM, Maxthon Chan wrote:
> The incident is that one project owner found his code used in an commercial product without attribution but the Chinese-speaking court says that the license is not enforceable if it is written in a language that the judge cannot understand, and that particular judge have only beginner level English.
>>> 
>>> This lead me to create two thing: a 3c-BSD equivalent in simple English, and a 3c-BSD equivalent in Chinese (under law of Mainland China).

While I completely understand your motivation here, the key point is
that licenses are not written in English (much less simple English), but
rather, in "Legalese", which uses a Law Dictionary instead of a standard
English dictionary. It is tricky (though, not impossible) to write a
simple license that parses reasonably the same in English and Legalese,
though, I'm not at all convinced that it is possible to do so with the
limited "simple English" subset. Rather than even trying that, I would
suggest that it would be better to have a proper legal translation done
of the 3c-BSD into Chinese, than to have a weak "simple English" version
for the rest of the world to struggle with.

~tom

==
Red Hat
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: tcallawa.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 4 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20150126/8e9e6f66/attachment.vcf>