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.
Our ip lawyers (Score:3, Interesting)
got stuck on the word 'or' in the perl license (GPL or Artistic)
I think there will always be a problem no matter how clear it seems to be.
Less licenses... (Score:4, Interesting)
The strength of Open Source licenses for me is the fact that once I've read them through once, I can install countless applications without needing to read a license agreement.
If commercial software had a bunch of shrink-wrapped licenses that companies were free to use and each license was clearly identifiable near the top, then people could just click the "I agree" button and actually know what they were agreeing to.
My case (Score:5, Interesting)
Me: We could save money using this pieces of GPL code..
MCSE: Doesn't that make all the derived work GPL?
Me: Yes.
MCSE: Then we must release our source code to public! This is confidential!!
Me: No....we are only required to release the source code when the recipents has the binary. We wouldn't release our system to public...
MCSE: but according to GPL, the source code is open to all to read!(?) The other department could read it and might release them to public!
Me: You might have misunderstood the concept...according to GPL's FAQ [fsf.org] we do not need to release the source code if we use them within an organization. A Government is one big organization, which is very suitable to adopt GPL....
MCSE: That's NOT I heard about GPL. I don't believe in what you said! GPL is about opensource and any dervied works must be made opensource, this is a very restrictive license and there's no way out!
and things went downhill from there. My boss trusted him because he has an MCSE.
I still ponder, what qualification in MCSE would make him know GPL better than others...
state diagrams (Score:2, Interesting)
i.e., have initial state of [PURCHASED], have an arrow to [MODIFY], [DISTRIBUTE], etc, with proper conditions which must be met to go to that state.
actually, this might make the GPL look much more complicated that most commercial licenses, which would just have the state of [LICENSED] and no way to get to modify or distribute, etc.
-rp
The GPL is a work of Art! (Score:4, Interesting)
Most people's eyes glaze over when they think they have to read a contract/license. Prod them into actaully reading the GPL - it's in real english and is honestly written. It's also a brillient bit of leagal-ese.
Courts have traditionally ruled in favor of the consumer if the contract is un-nesessarly obscure, so making the GPL hard to read in an vain attempt to close a loophole can be counterproductive if done in haste. Also, one must be carefull to not give a poorly thought out explenation of the GPL with the GPL - the court might rule that the explenation grants additional rights if the consumer is confused as to if the explenation is part of the contract/license.
So the short answer is to actually READ the GPL. There are no explenaions nesessary to an inteligent person - and no explenation will do the cosumer any good anyways. It's only us developers that need an explenation - we're the ones that can get caught in a GPL bind, not the average consumer.
Authors get cute and that's a mistake!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is a horrible way to protect the author from third party lawsuits. And the result is that our corporation does not officially sanction the use of openSSH. This leads to more suspicion and resistance to other open source tools and generally makes a mess of the whole effort.
I really wish authors would get a legal reading of their own licences for a reality check before doing what commercial licences do - that is "use this software and you are on your friggin own no matter what hombre!! I mean what next for licences? Rilly rilly kewl pictures and animations and shit?
About time someone said this (Score:5, Interesting)
As the resident office open source nut, a major part of my (non paid) role is stopping my employer stealing open source code. I have lost count of the number of times that I have found stolen open source code in our products. I say "stolen" advisedly, and it's the word I use when confronting the culprits.
The problem is that many of them simply do not understand that there is a cost associated with using "free" software. Sure, it's their fault for not reading it, but it would make my life a lot easier if we stopped wielding the word "free" like a weapon (it means too many things to too many people), and if the GPL (and other open source licenses) opened like this:
This code is copyrighted. It is not "free to use". You may not copy or use it in any way, including for non-commercial purposes, unless you follow strictly the enclosed license terms. If you do not read or follow the license terms, you will be in breach of copyright, and can and will be prosecuted for theft.
I'd say that a clear statement like this is way more important than the DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY that we tend to splash first. The disclaimer is there to protect the author, but a clear warning that open source code is copyrighted and strictly licensed protects the recipient from doing something stupid and causing grief to both parties. I'd say that it's more in the spirit of open source development to prioritise the copyright/license warning than the disclaimer.
Re:Keep it short (Score:3, Interesting)
I think keeping the lawyer language seperated and in confined and in smaller sections if necessary for someone who doesn't already understand it to figure it out.
in print! (Score:2, Interesting)
I say software should have a license that we can read from the package. I mean, If I go and buy a piece of software that comes in its nice little box, Id sure like to read the rules to use it before I go to the cashier and pay. Whats the point of the license if I cant read it until I pay for the thing!.
Its not only important to be able to read and understand an EULA, but to be able to read it at an adequate time; besides, if the EULA fits on the back of the box could be a good parameter for readability.
Re:I have a similar problem (Score:5, Interesting)
This software contains the intellectual property of several people. Intellectual property is a valuable resource, and you cannot expect to be able to use someone else's intellectual property in your own work for free.
Many businesses and individuals are willing to trade their intellectual property in exchange for something of value; usually money. For example, in return for a sum of money, you might be granted the right to incorporate code from someone's software program into your own.
The developers of this software are willing to trade you the right to use their intellectual property in exchange for something of value. However, instead of money, the developers are willing to trade you the right to freely incoroporate their code into your software in exchange for the right to freely incorporate your code into theirs. This exchange is to be done by way of and under the terms of the GPL.
If you do not think that this is a fair bargain, you are free to decline and to develop your own code or purchase it from someone else. You will still be allowed to use the software yourself, which is awfully nice of the developers, since you probably didn't pay them a penny for it in the first place. If you feel that this would make you a freeloading communist welfare addict, you may instead opt to purchase similar software from a less generous developer.
On complexity, summaries and good efforts (Score:3, Interesting)
As several people on this discussion have pointed out, the unfortunate thing about software licences (and legal documents generally) is that they are, by their nature, trying to be very exact. There is a reason that "shall" and "will" mean very different things in law, and that lawyers use the correct one, yet in common speech, most people would interpret them much the same way. Legalese has become complicated to deal with the problem of details: if you're not precise enough, you'll be (wilfully or otherwise) misinterpreted.
The next obvious thing to do is to introduce a summary of the licence, as the parent post by bshroyer and others have suggested. Unfortunately, that immediately raises the question of whether the summary is complete (almost by definition, it isn't), accurate, or even a fair representation of the real licence. Can anyone hear the words "legal minefield" in the back of their minds right now? I hope so. What if the summary and licence terms disagree? What if the summary looked reasonable, but the licence contained a restriction unmentioned in it, causing someone to violate the licence agreement because they'd trusted the summary? (That's actually the worst case, in a way, because if someone can't trust the summary to tell them what's going on, what's the point?) Do you try to introduce new laws now to force summaries to be fair reflections on the summarised material? If you could do that, why bother with the full version at all?
Why, indeed. In fact, for a long time, Borland used to have a licence agreement (called something like the "no nonsense licence agreement" IIRC) that aimed at much this purpose. It wasn't full of any more legalese than necessary. While it had to be long enough and in enough legalese to be precise, it wasn't deliberately obfuscated. I think they could score a major coup over the MS' of the world now if they brought back such an agreement, and marketed based on its ease and trustworthiness vs. MS' (un)Trustworthy Computing initiative that seems to steal half your (non-)rights through the EULA. (Remember Borland still offer MS major competition in the development tools market, for example, and hitting developers who would otherwise be drifting into MS' .NET program isn't going to do Microsoft any favours.)
So, basically, yes, your suggestion is far too simplistic, simply because the whole "summary" issue opens up too many cans of worms. OTOH, in the spirit of your suggestion, a licence agreement that was much shorter, to the point, precise enough but not deliberately hard to read would be a great improvement.
Now, if anyone thinks the big corps should be required to do this because it's easy, please submit your proposed rewrite of the GPL on a postcard...
WHAT IS THE UPPERCASE FOR? (Score:3, Interesting)
Also need to have the liscence before you buy it (Score:2, Interesting)
"similar code" not a violation (Score:3, Interesting)
There are some interesting issues here. The organization of a book is to some extent protected by copyright: if you write a book, and I write a book with an identical table of contents, I'm violating your copyright. By analogy, I guess mimicing an object hierarchy, for example, would be forbidden.
Anyone know any precedents?
(IANAL, just a programmer who's studied copyright issues more deeply than most.)
even harder, try explaining the GPL to lawyers (Score:2, Interesting)
the problem, it is explaining it to lawyers.
The company I work for employes a lot of Open Source Lawyers. All of the lawyers hate the GPL. They all love the idea and hate the wording. It was obviously not written by a lawyer, and hence though clear to you and me is not clear to a judge who actually has to enforce it.
Also the GPL has not been tested in court.
Admittidly most of the confusion involves interaction with non GPL code. For instance if you worked on a Linux device driver for product x under the GPL could you then work on a BSD device driver for product x? The answer is probably not, the BSD device driver could be seen as a derivitave work and you would have to release it under the GPL, which wouldn't fly very well at the BSD distributions who like to release under the BSD liscense.
You see we usually think of GPL infecting closed source, which most people would argue is a good thing. But the downside is that closed source developers cannot contribute to GPL projects because it might look like some of what they did under GPL was done under closed source, if it was or not.
Then even worse the same applies to devlopers under BSD or public domain type of liscences. This decreases sharing, it does not increase it.
Re:What's nice about the GPL (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm. If you are using someone else's code under the GPL, then you never had a right to sell their code in the first place. So I don't see how the GPL takes anything away from you.
Softman v. Adobe and MAI v. Peak (Score:3, Interesting)
It's tricky when it comes to software, since it hasn't been determined yet by the courts whether a software sale is a sale of a product or a sale of a license
Yes it has: Softman Products Company LLC v. Adobe Systems Inc. [cryptome.org] U.S. federal law, 17 USC 101 [cornell.edu] defines a "copy" as the physical disc on which a computer program is recorded. If the transfer of a copy of a program looks like a sale, walks like a sale, and quacks like a sale, then it's a sale, thus making the "owner of a copy" under 17 USC 117 [cornell.edu] the person who buys the box.
Some people might chime in and claim that MAI v. Peak nullified 117. I don't think so. The text of the decision [bowie-jensen.com] interpreted 117 out of context; the case it referenced, Apple v. Formula, involved selling copies, but the facts of MAI v. Peak didn't. (The decision prompted a rider to the DMCA that amended 117 to authorize repair or maintenance of a computer system.) The real copyright infringement seems to have involved the "rental, lease, or lending" of a computer program separate from any hardware in which it may be embedded, and 17 USC 109 [cornell.edu] prohibits rental of software without authorization of the copyright owner.
Make it more like... (Score:2, Interesting)
Most people can understand it without being a rocket scientist, too.
Licensing Markup Language? (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, someone comparing software packages could easily diff the licenses. He might find that of seven accounting packages only one prohibits attempting to export the data, and therefore steer clear of that one.
In fact, if vendors don't want to do this (clearly they prefer obscurity) there's nothing stopping us from encoding the existing licenses in such a format.
GNU vs Msft EULA (Score:1, Interesting)
Standard licences. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:short and sweet (Score:2, Interesting)
I like to contribute to the community (I do work on several Open Source projects in my spare time, but I won't have much spare time if I can't make money selling my software.
Any ideas on what do to? The GPL only works for hobbyists(sp?), and large companies that can make most of their money in the support areas of their GPL'd program. Is there any way a small 2-8 person company can either release their own programs and make money under the GPL, or use GPL'd programs to incorporate into theirs and make money? I have read thousands of articles and posts (literally), written to GNU, and FSF, posted and read in NG's and have yet heard a good answer to the above question (BTW, it has been over a year and neither GNU nor FSF have replied). I can't remember when or who, but when I read on slashdot that some big GPL proponent even said that GPL wasn't for small companies or individuals, thats when I figured it was doomed as a license for MOST programmers who like to not starve and sleep on the street. I'd love to hear a reason why I'm wrong!