Re: Making legal issues as short as possible
> On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 09:20:42PM +0100, Harald Geyer wrote:
>>> "Copyright 2005 by XYZ. The copyright holder hereby grants permission to
>>> everyone, forever, to do anything with this work which would otherwise be
>>> restricted by his exclusive legal rights."
>> This is sufficiently short, shorter than most things which are
>> copyrightable at all. Thanks for the suggestion!
>
> And, as I pointed out, a poor suggestion. Please do not use it; you'll
> be doing the free software world a disfavor
I don't see anything in our message that is not specific to my
original wording. Probably you can give me a pointer, why this
"enhanced version" is still poor.
Especially I don't see why a liberal and short license is a disfavor
to free software.
> (not to mention failing to
> disclaim warranty, putting yourself in danger).
That's a different issue, I left out for simplicity. I don't know much
about that field either and luckily I live in a country, where this issue
is less important than otherwhere.
However I like to discuss that separately from licensing because of the
following reason: There are three parties involved. The author, the
copyright holder and the distributor. Who is liable depends on who
is making claims about the product.
Obviously the only one involved in the license is the copyright holder.
I guess the main reason for putting licenses and disclaimers together
is, that in most cases author and copyright holder are the same.
I'd like to see it as common practice that some softwares documentation
isn't making any claims about the software but only describes how it
is supposed to work. Although this is obvious to us, it might not
be obvious to others - it is good to include some disclaimer in this
cases.
But there are also other cases without documentation or anything else
that can be misread as claim. Think about dictionaries, small
configuration files, a set of tiles or something similiar. Probably
these things aren't copyrightable at all but we are still urged to
claim copyright to deal with strange jurisdictions and the like.
In this case it sucks to have to attach a license, ten times the size
of the work itselve.
Harald
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