[repost] [j at uriah.heep.sax.de: For Approval: The beer-ware license]
Juergen Weigert
jw at suse.de
Fri Jan 11 17:04:55 UTC 2008
On Jan 11, 08 03:15:56 -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> One of its explicit aims, by the way, is to discourage licence
> proliferation. Its first step in that area has been to classify
> proposed licences into five descriptive categories:
>
> * Licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong communities
openSUSE distribution knows ca. 70 packages with the beer-ware license.
> * Special purpose licenses
Not special purpose, but special qualities:
- It is permissive to the extreme.
- It is phrased avoiding legalese.
> * Licenses that are redundant with more popular licenses
Rick suggested this category by mentioning BSD/MIT as popular
alternatives. BSD and MIT avoid a lot of legalese but not all
(which is fine).
> You (speaking for Mr. Kamp) insist that a basically pointless licence
> must be "blessed", and summarily reject suggestions that it be junked in
> favour of a better and more-standard one.
Joergs insistance is on a 'why not', not on a 'blessing'.
The beer-ware license was adopted by at least three other
authors including Joerg. These authors (and projects
accepting such licensed code) would not consider it pointless, would they?
[necessity of a warranty disclaimer]
> > This is not obvios at all to me. What is it needed for? Who needs
> > it?
>
> Mr. Kamp is willing to run the risk of being sued for warranty
> obligations over a work that he passes out in public for no charge, and
> over whose uses he has no control whatsoever? Bold man.
I believe this is simply a flaw in the beer-ware license.
Or maybe local law in Denmark protects phk sufficiently?
Ommission of a warranty disclamer may endanger the author.
Such dangers sould be a valid justification for disapproval.
Unfortunalty this is out of scope of the The Open Source Definition.
If there were something like (please rephrase) ...
11. License must be re-usable by other parties without imposing
unreasonable limitations or risks.
... a missing disclaimer could be considered an unreasonable risk.
cheers,
Jw.
PS: Joerg, please continue your work on *avr* packages,
whatever OSI says.
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