[License-review] For Approval: Convertible Free Software License, Version 1.1 (C-FSL v1.1)

Bruce Perens bruce at perens.com
Fri Sep 28 15:25:00 UTC 2018


:-)

Perhaps you can explain to us how a court practicing European law would
parse your license as you intend, while a court in the United States would
not.

But I am only being sarcastic. You can't do that.


On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 1:47 AM Elmar Stellnberger <estellnb at elstel.org>
wrote:

>
>
> On 9/28/18 1:45 AM, Bruce Perens wrote:
> >
> >         Nobody is forced to contribute. If a contributor has read the
> >     license
> >     he can then decide thereupon whether he wants to contribute or not.
> >
> >
> > It is an unfortunate fact that most of the developers do not have access
> > to legal counsel, and are poorly equipped to parse the license on their
> > own. So "caveat emptor" isn't a really good argument here. OSI should
> > not approve a license with language that works as a trap for the unwary
> > developer.
> >
>
> The opposite is true. The license has intendedly been written in a way
> so that programmers not only lawyers can understand it. To me it is a
> crucial fact because the programmers are those who will need to know how
> the license works in order to do their programming work.
>
>  > Another license, the original Artistic License written by a non-attorney
>  > got to court and the lower court parsed it in a completely unintended
>  > fashion, costing an Open Source developer some money and years of pain,
>  > and requiring various lawyers and I to spend a lot of time helping the
>  > appeals court get it straight. So, OSI should not accept licenses
>  > written by non-attorneys any longer.
>
> It may be the way that US juristication is somewhat odd with regards to
> common sense. I believe we have a better legal system here in Europe and
> especially in Austria. If any of the original authors comes from Europe
> it is an option to apply European law.
>


-- 
Bruce Perens K6BP - CEO, Legal Engineering
Standards committee chair, license review committee member, co-founder,
Open Source Initiative
President, Open Research Institute; Board Member, Fashion Freedom
Initiative.
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