[License-discuss] plain text license versions?

[Lawrence Rosen]

That's unfortunate, because I advise it all the time for all licenses. Anything more is a waste of time. And my clients have never been sued for posting a link instead of a license. Maybe we are lucky??? 

/Larry (from my tablet and brief) 

Luis Villa <luis at tieguy.org> wrote:

>On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 2:37 PM, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
>> Is distribution of the *link* to the license sufficient compliance with this requirement?
>
>For CC and MPL 2, yes.
>
>MIT and many others? The conventional interpretation is "no."
>
>Luis
>
>> /Larry (from my tablet and brief)
>>
>> Luis Villa <luis at tieguy.org> wrote:
>>
>>>On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 12:14 PM, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
>>>> Karl Fogel wrote:
>>>>> Many coders expect to find plaintext license terms in a LICENSE or
>>>>> COPYING file, directly in the source tree.
>>>>
>>>> I'd count that as another reason *not* to provide plain text license files. I think it would be FAR more useful to have a simple license statement in the source tree of each program that points to the OFFICIAL version of that license on the OSI website. This also avoids the duplication of text -- with potential transcription or legal errors -- in many source code trees, and completely avoids the need to actually read the licenses if one trusts OSI.
>>>>
>>>> Doesn't CC do that, in a way, with their license logos?
>>>
>>>More specifically, CC does it with the requirement in the license that
>>>attribution notices link to the canonical text. Many OSS software
>>>licenses, unfortunately, require distribution of the actual text of
>>>the license.
>>>
>>>Luis