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

[John Cowan]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 2:41 PM Kyle Mitchell <kyle at kemitchell.com> wrote:

Declaring approved licenses non-precedential would reject
> the common-law mechanism by which US law develops, which you
> describe.  That system relies on precedent, not just to
> decide new cases that retread old, but also novel cases, by
> analogy and abstracting out rules.
>

Stare decisis has never meant a mechanical adherence to precedent,
nor a requirement that precedent overrule reason, justice, and common sense.
Here's James Kent, the first Chancellor (head of the Court of Chancery,
a court of equity and not law) in New York after the Revolution:

 But I wish not to be understood to press too strongly the doctrine
> of stare decisis, when I recollect that there are one thousand cases
> to be pointed out in the English and American books of reports,
> which have been overruled, doubted or limited in their application.
> It is probable that the records of many of the courts in this country
> are replete with hasty and crude decisions; and such cases ought
> to be examined without fear, and revised without reluctance,
>  rather than to have the character of our law impaired, and the beauty
>  and harmony of the system destroyed by the perpetuity of error.


A lot of the early OSI decisions were indeed crude and hasty, though
well-intentioned, and by nobody's fault in particular.

-- 
John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
People go through the bother of Christmas because Christmas helps them
to understand why they go through the bother of living out their lives
the rest of the year. For one brief instant, we see human society as it
should and could be, a world in which business has become the exchanging
of presents and in which nothing is important except the happiness and
well-being of the ultimate consumer.  --Northrop Frye (1948)
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