Re: Re: Æsthetic Permissive License - For Approval

[Sean B. Palmer]

On Dec 28, 2007 6:04 PM, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:

> Am I an entity now?

Yes. I took the term "entity" from the OSI approved Fair License:

"Usage of the works is permitted provided that this instrument is
retained with the works, so that any entity that uses the works is
notified of this instrument."
- http://opensource.org/licenses/fair.php

Did you not review this license?

> Since when is a license an "instrument"?

Again, this is a term taken from the Fair License.

> What about all the other IP rights that might be embodied in a work?

As far as I was able to tell from reading the OSD, only the rights
that I enumerated were required to be enumerated.

> Why are we wasting our time on this?

I set the rationale out in my original submission message:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2007Dec/0073

And I'd be willing to expand upon it, but given that you've already
classified this as a waste of time I'm not sure that your opinion is
malleable enough to be worth the effort. This is disheartening, but
perhaps it was simply hyperbole to encode a very strong professional
opinion? It seems to me an impolite rhetoric.

Programmers don't like licenses that seem like a waste of bytes, and
since they're not lawyers it's very difficult to see why what seem
like verbose licenses are required. Just one example:

"I think that people really use software licenses to express
intentions, and don't really read the details of the licenses. So I
think that licenses should be made as simple as possible, so that they
don't disagree with intentions…"
- http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000360

That's the short of it.

-- 
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/