peddrenth asks:
"Software licenses are, we keep saying, difficult to read. The public clicks OK without reading, either implicitly trusting or mistrusting us the software authors. There have been calls recently for companies to clean-up the license, to bullet, section, and colour their licenses, to remove THE UPPERCASE
and to draw charts and graphs to explain the license. Anyone who's had to read a 3-page document in a 3"x1" textbox knows how useful this would be. The GPL is one of the most important licenses in the world, and appears on thousands of products. Everything from windows programs to operating systems to people's artwork requires understanding and acceptance of the GNU GPL. Should we, the free software community, take the first step in this effort, and show the world what an easy-to-read license looks like? Would it be useful if long textual software licenses stood out like a sore thumb amongst the cool, pretty, and clear free licenses?" Many may think the GPL Preamble to be clear enough, and this may be true. However there are a lot of people out there that would like to read the
entire license so that they know exactly what they may be getting into,
before they agree to it. This usually implies being able reading the actual license, and not just the preamble.
"Should we use such a comparison to show the public how they're being manipulated by terms in a EULA they don't read or understand, and encourage other license-writers to include the graphs and tables themselves, showing the public what a license really means?
What would be your ideal license, what poster would you draw to explain the GPL to a child, a PHB, or an artist? Would you stick with the text, or can you think of anything better?"
jamie interjects: The root of the problem is that "intellectual property" is a kludge of a natural human understanding of property rights. Useful, but a kludge. You have to invent many
oddball concepts
to keep up the pretense that ideas are property. The GPL is a kludge (strict and precise licensing terms) implemented on top of a kludge (copyright law) and, in English or in code, there is no short and simple way to describe complex things.
it's hard (Score:0, Informative)
You should forget about software licenses too. I mean Lesbian pr0n videos are alright, but they are no substitute to being there in person. I also wouldn't recommend getting into kludge unless you are into kinky stuff like that.
Remember: Girly Pink Lesbians should be for EVERYONE.
The GPL FAQ is pretty good - (Score:4, Informative)
But *my* open source license *is* small... (Score:2, Informative)
From http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.ht
EULA terms not enforceable (Score:2, Informative)
The more presentable and easy to understand, the more enforceable.
In the UK, we have laws such as the Unfair Contract Terms Act which outlaw certain types of clause even if they are easy to read but might allow others ONLY if they are easy to understand.
By all means use the GPL as a shining example of the way it should be done, it may actually be used in court to help defeat some of the more ridiculous EULAs.
Re:What's nice about the GPL (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. The BSD/MIT style licenses give you this right, for which reason advocates of those licenses claim that they're "more free" than the GPL. I'm not sure if I agree with the point, but there are licenses that give the first-generation user more rights than the GPL. The argument is then over whether those rights are more valuable than the GPL's protection of second and later generation users.
YOU CAN'T GET RID OF UPPERCASE (Score:5, Informative)
So if you changed from upper case to bold italic lower case, you would very likely face a legal challenge that your notice was not "noticable", and you would have to fight that throught the court hierarchy. However, once somebody did do this, then others could use that as precedent.
Wrong. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:short and sweet (Score:3, Informative)
THERE IS NO INFECTION
what is yours, is yours, and if you built something on top of what was previously ours but you don't want it to be ours, you cannot play with the thing that was ours, that is to say, rebuild your stuff on top of other stuff.
You don't have to show everyone your code, just leave ours far from it.
Understood??
Re:Its wordy and hard to read for a reason... (Score:4, Informative)
2+2=4
The ANSWER is equal to the SUM of the FIRST NUMBER and the SECOND NUMBER, where the FIRST NUMBER has the same value as the SECOND NUMBER. IF AND ONLY IF the SECOND NUMBER has the value of the SECOND POSITIVE INTEGER, the ANSWER will have the value of the FOURTH POSITIVE INTEGER.
GPL: no license required for use (Score:5, Informative)
You need not agree to a license in order to use this software.
The installation should somewhere contain copyright information, warantee disclaimer (which the user is not required to approve), and a link to the GPL. See also How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs [gnu.org].
Re:What's nice about the GPL (Score:3, Informative)
This would, however, require that, when you sell your copy, you give the recipient ALL VERSIONS of your copy, and destroy any backups you may have .. If you kept/gave a copy then you've made a copy and that action would be subject to regular copyright restrictions (unless you've agreed to the GPL).
That would apply in cases like a contractor doing a work-for-hire on a piece of GPL work, and leaving the result with the employer. -- but you'd still have to give them your source code, because if you gave them a modified object, it would be a copy, and subject to copyright rules (i.e. you can't). On the other hand: if you gave them an unmodified object/source, what in the world did they pay you for?
GPL is not an End-User License Agreement (Score:3, Informative)
The preamble to the GPL is adequate because it does not need to be read (much less agreed to) for a user to use GPL software. There is no EULA. The GPL itself does not apply until a user attempts to distribute, modify, or otherwise create derivatives of the software. This will almost never happen in the normal use of most software.
It would be more appropriate to draft the GPL using RFC terminology so that those who will be distributing, modifying, or otherwise creating derivative programs can understand the license. Coders don't speak legalese, but most can grok an RFC.
Nathan
Re:short and sweet (Score:2, Informative)