Æsthetic Permissive License - For Approval

Rick Moen rick at linuxmafia.com
Fri Dec 28 21:59:42 UTC 2007


Quoting Sean B. Palmer (sean at miscoranda.com):

> Since I'm not a lawyer, I presume that users will appreciate any
> available stringent license review, especially given that testing a
> license in the judicial system is hardly possible for a new license.
> 
> My submission has generated a surprising amount of positive feedback
> in private, so I think I've hit the nail on the head at least in
> spirit!

I think you might find, upon examination, that the reception your effort
has received is closer to good-natured approval of your goal of brevity, 
but otherwise little or no enthusiasm.  

That is, one doesn't want to seem churlish towards someone carrying out
a well-intentioned effort, but the possible word-count savings over,
say, the MIT/X and new-BSD licences are very small.  Also, to pick just
one element as an example, standard warranty disclaimer phrasing is more
likely to have a predictable and desirable effect in court.  In the
larger sense, a new proposed licence has to have _very_ compelling
advantages over established ones to offset the drawbacks inherent in
newness (a licence everyone must read and evaluate, which is not true of
familiar ones) and more-complex licence combinatorics in derivative
works.

You obviously _do_ feel that reducing word count significantly below the
relative terseness of MIT/X and new-BSD is a compelling advantage.  It
would be impolite (and pointless) to argue; I'll merely point out that 
probably most readers of this mailing list, and, in particular, those
from whom you seek a stringent licence review, just don't share your
view on that point.  Hence, you're not getting a lot of feedback except
of the (variously) "That's nice, good luck" or "Is this really worth all
the trouble and uncertainty about effect?" varieties.

I do honestly apologise for this post not substantively helping you at
all, but the "surprising amount of positive feedback" and "hit the nail
on the heads" bits seemed to call for comment.  (Naturally, I may be
wrong about prevailing reaction, but think my summary matches what's
been seen on-list.)

-- 
Cheers,                                     Ceci n'est pas une pipe:   |
Rick Moen
rick at linuxmafia.com 



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