[License-review] The Mutualist License (MutuaL) v1.2

[Rob Landley]

On 6/8/26 20:06, Pamela Chestek wrote:
> Dear Kat,
> 
> I appreciate that you are trying to solve the problem that legal 
> documents are often difficult to understand for a reader who is not 
> legally trained. However, writing legal documents is not very different 
> from writing code: there are drafting conventions, rules for 
> interpretation, and specific words that are used when construing what 
> the intended meaning is. Writing a legal agreement without following 
> these rules is no different from writing code that doesn't follow the 
> rules -- it just doesn't work.

Worse, legalese has jurisdictions, roughly analogous to different 
operating systems. Even within posix: Cygwin is all eldrich corner 
cases, OS/360 is a 64 bit big endian system with a zillion deployments 
and SO MUCH MONEY behind it, and Android is extra weird but has almost 
FOUR BILLION users... That's what it's like writing a license in the USA 
and looking out at the legal systems of Canada, EU, Japan, Korea, India, 
Australia... Even within the USA, the various circuit courts are like 
Ubuntu vs Red Hat vs Arch vs Alpine...

Also, think of intellectual property licenses a bit like cryptographic 
code. I don't care how great a programmer you are, you need domain 
expertise in this specific area reviewing your stuff or the real world 
will immediately pop your clever new idea with two side channel attacks, 
a race condition, and a known firmware vulnerability you never heard of. 
Zero day if you get their attention.

None of the big players will deploy your thing on something load bearing 
until it's been around for a while and probably had a few dot releases. 
You can slap together your own personal project that works for you and 
nobody else, but sending it to OSI for review is like submitting your 
package to Fedora.

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/office-locations

Rob

P.S. don't get me started on copyright vs contract vs patent vs 
trademark vs trade secret. Or Gavin "spyware" Newsom declaring $7500 per 
download bounties on software that doesn't spy on its users...