On Mar 5, 2009, at 12:19 PM, graham wrote:
I think it would be
extremely helpful if the licenses themselves included an explanation
for
non-lawyers, in the way the gpl always did.
Not always a good idea. If your license has any ambiguities, then a
judge will go outside your license to see if you've said anything else
about the meaning of the license. Potentially, anything you say about
the license could become part of the license. So your non-legal
explanation actually may have legal import.
In principle, you're suggesting that code should be explained in the
comments, when actually, comments should explain things that *aren't*
in the code. If you want to know what the code says, you should be
reading the code, not the comments. If you want to know what a legal
agreement says, you should read it. It's tedious, yes, but I've read
every one of the OSI approved Open Source licenses at least twice, and
I lived through it. if you call this living, of course. I could be a
zombie, and how would you know??
--
Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog -
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
r...@cloudmade.com - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson
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