For Approval: The Azure License

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Kenneth Ballenegger <seoxys at gmail.com> writes:
> Dag-Erling, I wasn't aware of the CPAL license. However, it's one of
> those super-long licenses, which is something I'm trying to avoid. I
> want to keep it short, sweet and simple.

You're missing an important point, which is that the CPAL (don't fall
prey to the RAS syndrome!) is OSI approved, fairly well-known, fairly
well-understood, and most importantly, written by lawyers in legalese;
your license is neither.

You may think you're doing your users a favor with your "short, sweet
and simple" license, but you're not.  To them or their lawyers, it's Yet
Another License they have to read, interpret, and translate into
legalese so they can be reasonably confident about what it means, how it
interacts with other licenses, and how it interacts with their own IP.
They'll have to figure out what it actually means to "give attribution
to the party mentioned above, by name and by hyperlink, in the about
box, credits document and/or documentation of any derivative work using
a substantial portion of this Work": what is a "substantial portion"?
How to you comply with the hyperlink requirement in printed
documentation, or in a console-based application?  What if their
application doesn't have anything that can be unambiguously described as
"about box, credits document and/or documentation"?

Ask yourself this: if what you actually wanted was something GPL-like,
would you write your own "short, sweet and simple" GPL-like license
instead of using the actual GPL?

Do you think those "super-long" licenses are super-long because they
were written by someone who was paid by the word, or because all that
verbiage is actually necessary to unambiguously convey the intentions
behind them?

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no