On Tue, 30 October 2001, Steve Lhomme wrote:
> http://www.networkcomputing.com/1222/1222ws1.html

The part that looked promising was actually the 
tiny table in gif form, that is barely noticable 
on page two.

http://img.cmpnet.com/nc/1222/graphics/1222ws1.gif

The idea of being able to compare license to license
in table form has its appeal. (whether that particular
table achieves that or not, eh, maybe not)

the problem would be to come up with the table categories
such that they align with copyright law and real-world effects.

copy, modify, distribute is all copyright law cares about.
but there's distinctions within those categories.
i.e. LGPL vs GPL: one lets you distribute outside code linked 
with the original code, and the other does not.

I don't know what all the distinctions are between all the
licenses to know if they can be easily broken down into a 
small, finite set of categories, put in table form with 
yes/no answers, and have such a table fully describe the
effects of the license. It would be nice.

The idea would be for a non-lawyer programmer to be able to look
at the table and select the license that does what they want.
it would be a lot easier to compare apples to apples
if all the columns lined up nicely.

Greg



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