Licence which allows trivial conversion to undocumented.

[Dave J Woolley]

> From:	David Johnson [SMTP:david at usermode.org]
> 
> 
> Other than the strange warning on the bottom, it appears to be a
> straightforward MIT license to me. I'm not sure what your concern with
> the documentation is. There is no documentation requirement that I can
> see, unless it is mentioned elsewhere outside of the license.
> 
	[DJW:]  The part about documentation is that the licence
	is given to people who receive the software plus documentation.
	The anomaly is that anyone can recursively sub-license it 
	without supplying documentation, so, for all practical 
	purposes, it could simply say to anyone receiving the 
	software, without the added qualification
	of also receiving the documentation.

> "fictitious business name". I don't think there's a problem
> here as the copyright would belong to the owners of the firm regardless
> of their "alias".
> 
	[DJW:]  I'm pretty sure that there is no legally 
	incorporated body here that could own the copyright.
	They are just an informal group of people that belong to 
	a club (which might be legally incorporated, but wouldn't
	own the copyright).  This would be under German law, not
	US law.  I'm not sure of the position in UK law, let alone
	German,  but I suspect
	there would be a test of what could be "resonably" understood
	to the intentions if there were an obvious "legal person".

	After writing this initially, I had the thought that there is
	really a need for an article on the OSI site, or a reference to
	one, which explains who can actually own a copyright and the
	advisability of creating a legal person, or creating a formal
	agreement to avoid future disputes.  A number of open source
	projects have got into difficulty when one of the joint 
	copyright owners has decided to change the coyright basis of
	their contributions.  The Lynx project has been unable to include
	SSL because of the difficulty of renogiating the licence (until
	the RSA patent expired, there would have been a licensing conflict).

	You probably want a real lawyer to write this, although they will
	probably want to stress the problems, rather than the solutions.

IANAL
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