[Fwd: Re: For Approval: The Azure License]

[Tzeng, Nigel H.]

I agree with Luis on many (if not all) his points.

I will note that CC has shown that the licenses themselves do not need to be easy to read (although theirs mostly are...just a lot longer than BSD) as long as it's wrapped in an easy to understand, human readable summary/deed.

It seems that someone could do a software commons family of licenses and submit the open source ones to OSI for approval.  Not being able to use CC's buttons is kinda a drag.
  
-----Original Message-----
From: Luis Villa [mailto:luis.villa at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 07, 2009 11:15 PM
To: Bruce Perens
Cc: License Review
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: For Approval: The Azure License]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 11:05 PM, Bruce Perens<bruce at perens.com> wrote:
> Luis Villa wrote:
>>
>> It seems like it'd be terrific to require a statement of motive for
>> the license (and perhaps description of the community the license is
>> intended to serve?) as part of the license-review discussion.
>
> He wants a permissive license that is simple to read and has an attribution
> requirement.
>
> It's pretty boring, maybe not worth making the license propagation problem
> worse. There's no such license already approved?

(tongue-slightly-in-cheek) CC-BY?

If clarity really is a problem, someone should sit down and do a
family of simple, clear licenses, CC-style, rather than yet another ad
hoc, one-off license. The net impact of Yet Another License is more
confusion, not less, even if that one license is by itself less
confusing than the others.

(My own sense is that clarity is a problem, but not a big enough
problem to merit making the proliferation problem worse unless the
solution to the clarity problem was part of a more comprehensive
attack on the proliferation problem.)

(I'm still waiting for the OSI equivalent of
http://creativecommons.org/license/ personally ;)

>> and perhaps description of the community
>
> From his statement, it's for application to his own software.

Ah, I did not read the linked web page (the statement), only your email.

Luis