"Lawrence Rosen" <lro...@rosenlaw.com> writes: >> Have we (OSI) ever seriously adding putting plain text versions of >> licenses (where available) to the OSI website? > >While this makes no difference to the legal implications of a license, >converting to plain text destroys information useful for human beings to >comprehend the license. It is like removing indentation and line endings >from source code. Please don't encourage old-fashioned ways of representing >licenses so they can't be easily read by the only ones that matter: Human >beings. > >This is part of my existential battle, including within Apache, to >acknowledge that HTML allows for a richer vocabulary of expression. Quit >down-versioning our creative works. :-) Does this qualify as a "historical? >technical? inertial? other?" reason in your lexicon? Whichever, why waste >time creating an 80-column ASCII format in this day and age? Some people, I >guess, still use punched cards for their software, but let's ignore their >needs.
Actually, I think we should provide plain text versions. (See http://projects.opensource.org/redmine/issues/8, which is about this.) Many coders expect to find plaintext license terms in a LICENSE or COPYING file, directly in the source tree. While they can of course still understand the text if it's in HTML, they prefer plain text -- and their editor software will often display HTML as raw markup rather than as a pretty page. So there's a very relevant group who want & expect plain text versions. When we don't provide those versions, those people sometimes manually reformat our HTML pages [1] in order to produce a plaintext file, occasionally introducing errors or at least inconsistencies. It's better if we just provide canonical versions. Karl [1] I have had to do this on more than one occasion. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss