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

[Luis Villa]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 11:11 AM, Tzeng, Nigel H.<Nigel.Tzeng at jhuapl.edu> wrote:
> 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.

The important thing isn't the buttons; the important thing is that you
can ask someone a fairly short, reasonable set of questions about
their needs and priorities, and give them a recommendation based on
that.

OSI could do that sort of thing if it were willing to say 'X is our
preferred license if you want share-alike qualities', but since it
isn't, we instead have to give people this long, horrible list and
hope that they can figure it out. Which is a mess on a whole lot of
levels.

Luis

> -----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
>