On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 10:55 AM, Richard Fontana fontana@sharpeleven.org wrote:
On 09/26/2012 01:09 PM, Mike Linksvayer wrote:
As I've carped elsewhere, the state of the art of permissive licenses is pretty poor.
Is there any public record of such carping? I'm curious to know your views on that topic.
I don't think in any more detail than above. I probably don't have a very good case to make, but here it is:
* Exclusive (due to lack of alternative) choice between at best implied patent grant (MIT/BSD/etc) and GPLv2-incompatibility (Apache2) seems suboptimal * Apache2 is a whole bunch of text for what it does...copyleft-next-current is shorter. * There are lots of minor variations of MIT/BSD/etc; a permissive license with a canonical text would be minorly nice * "reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer" (BSD) not ideal for anything but non-minified source (admittedly that's most cases, but why not more?), Apache2 more ambiguous ("attach") and in practice Apache projects just link to the license, eg for documentation, copyleft-next-current says "inform recipients how they can obtain a copy of this License", IMO best. * People in domains not far from software think Apache2 language inadequate to cover their works (I think they're mostly wrong, but I don't see any reason there shouldn't be a permissive (and a copyleft; I intend to post about this) license that may unambiguously be used for software and eg for "open hardware" designs).
OTOH I think it is kind of nice that the most widely used permissive license(s of course; BSD) are almost unchanged over approaching 3 decades, apart from removing clauses slowly understood to be harmful (advertising) or unnecessary (no endorsement); maybe any further optimization would just cause people to think about licenses more than they ought to.
Mike