On Wed, 17 Jul 2002, Karl O . Pinc wrote:

> Hardly FUD.  You'll recall this was in response to "I find the
> discussion fruitless. I write code, I give it away."  Give it away by
> putting it in the public domain, or by using no license at all opens
> coders up to all kinds of problems.  The dude sounds like he thinks
> licenses are irrelevant.  They are not.  In case you don't happen to
> know, you can be held responsible for damage caused by your software
> unless you use a license which prevents this.  You sound like you only
> care about a license's relevance to a software author, not a software
> user.  Fine.

If I'm not mistaken, the point is not that the license is ignored as an
irrelevant "detail", but chosen so that one is able to code freely, give
the code away, and not spend time worrying about the implications of a
restrictive and complicated license.  The BSD license seems to have worked
well in that respect.

[ This is a digression, but IMHO, users should also not have to spend much
time at all thinking about a license.  Speaking only of legal liability,
if a user pays nothing for a piece of software, why should the software
author be responsible for its effects?  And should commercial software
manufacturers not be held responsible for a product they sell?  Erik Fair
wrote a good (albeit short) opinion piece on this:

	http://www.clock.org/~fair/opinion/software-liability.html

>                                             You'll just have to take
> it on faith that licenses make a real-world difference to some people
> and so, are worth discussing.

Yes, licenses make a real-world difference.  Compressing the licenses into
smaller chunks of text is nice, but it doesn't really provide much help to
a user.  Perhaps it will allow them to understand a large portion of a
license in a short period of time, but it can never be a complete
substitution for the real license text.  The licenses are long (some of
them are ridiculously long-winded), but not incomprehensible, even to
Normal People.  They might have to whip out a dictionary like Foldoc, but
if they care enough (hah), then they should be able to get through it.

I'm sure your effort is appreciated, but personally, I would rather see a
more fundamental change in how people view licenses, instead of a mere
clarification of a mess of legalese.

-- 
Tyler Mitchell

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      -- Douglas Adams