[repost] [j at uriah.heep.sax.de: For Approval: The beer-ware license]

[Juergen Weigert]

On Jan 11, 08 03:15:56 -0800, Rick Moen wrote:

> One of its explicit aims, by the way, is to discourage licence 
> proliferation.  Its first step in that area has been to classify
> proposed licences into five descriptive categories:
> 
>     * Licenses that are popular and widely used or with strong communities

openSUSE distribution knows ca. 70 packages with the beer-ware license.

>     * Special purpose licenses

Not special purpose, but special qualities:
- It is permissive to the extreme. 
- It is phrased avoiding legalese.

>     * Licenses that are redundant with more popular licenses

Rick suggested this category by mentioning BSD/MIT as popular 
alternatives. BSD and MIT avoid a lot of legalese but not all 
(which is fine).

> You (speaking for Mr. Kamp) insist that a basically pointless licence
> must be "blessed", and summarily reject suggestions that it be junked in
> favour of a better and more-standard one.  

Joergs insistance is on a 'why not', not on a 'blessing'.

The beer-ware license was adopted by at least three other 
authors including Joerg.  These authors (and projects
accepting such licensed code) would not consider it pointless, would they?

[necessity of a warranty disclaimer]
> > This is not obvios at all to me.  What is it needed for?  Who needs
> > it?
> 
> Mr. Kamp is willing to run the risk of being sued for warranty
> obligations over a work that he passes out in public for no charge, and
> over whose uses he has no control whatsoever?  Bold man.

I believe this is simply a flaw in the beer-ware license.
Or maybe local law in Denmark protects phk sufficiently?

Ommission of a warranty disclamer may endanger the author. 
Such dangers sould be a valid justification for disapproval. 
Unfortunalty this is out of scope of the The Open Source Definition. 
If there were something like (please rephrase) ...

11. License must be re-usable by other parties without imposing 
    unreasonable limitations or risks.

... a missing disclaimer could be considered an unreasonable risk.


cheers,
        Jw.

PS: Joerg, please continue your work on *avr* packages, 
whatever OSI says.

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