?sthetic Permissive License - For Approval

Lawrence Rosen lrosen at rosenlaw.com
Sat Dec 29 20:22:20 UTC 2007


Russ wrote and perhaps unfortunately believes:
> Do you realize that you're telling a lawyer that he doesn't know the
> law?  That would be like telling a programmer that he doesn't
> understand the difference between passing a parameter by reference or
> by value.

Not quite. I admit in advance that we lawyers are quite capable of not
knowing the law, and we should be smoked out if necessary. :-) And everyone
is free to tell a programmer that he doesn't know the law. 

What Sean said is true, although it concerns a different problem: Some open
source licenses require additional attribution and other notices beyond the
two-line notice I recommended. However, those two lines--all by
themselves--suffice to claim ownership of a copyrightable work and to
license it to the public under an open source license: 

     Copyright (C) <year> <author or owner>
     Licensed to the public under the XXXX license.

For other notice requirements when distributing or re-distributing, read the
license!

The two-line notice I suggested is, in some sense, a minimum that satisfies
John Cowan's obscure "McQuary limit" test. I had to go to Google after
reading John's email, never having heard of that test before. Here's the
first hit:
http://www.answers.com/topic/mcquary-limit-computer-jargon?cat=technology.
John often teases us with such ancient runes from the days when the web was
slow and warriors fought.

As to my own licenses, OSL/AFL 3.0, that two-line form of notice is
expressly the minimum required. I don't believe that there is any useful
purpose served by cluttering the web with actual license text that may (or
may not) differ from the official versions posted at official websites.
That's another reason I didn't like Sean's proposed license, nor do I like
the variety of BSD-like but subtly different texts of licenses buried in
distributions all over the web. That mess could be solved by adopting
licenses that require a two-line notice satisfying John Cowan's "McQuary
limit" test--and placing other notices only in the Source Code. 

/Larry



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Russ Nelson [mailto:nelson at crynwr.com]
> Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2007 11:23 AM
> To: license-review at opensource.org
> Subject: Re: Re: ?sthetic Permissive License - For Approval
> 
> Sean B. Palmer writes:
>  > On Dec 29, 2007 6:38 AM, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
>  >
>  > >    Copyright (C) <year> <author or owner>
>  > >    Licensed to the public under the XXXX license.
>  >
>  > This alone is not sufficient:
> 
> Do you realize that you're telling a lawyer that he doesn't know the
> law?  That would be like telling a programmer that he doesn't
> understand the difference between passing a parameter by reference or
> by value.
> 
> In case I'm being too subtle:
> #define parameter license
> 
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