Inline text not URLs for licenses (was: Re: Is the OSL DFSG free?)
On Tuesday, Sep 2, 2003, at 12:49 US/Eastern, Branden Robinson wrote:
When referring to a license, it's useful to provide a URL to the text
of
the license in question.
I respectfully disagree. It's useful to provide the full text of the
license in question, not just a URL.
Rationale:
I often read this list in offline mode, which at lunch. I am now.
IMAP makes it real easy to do that. I'm sure many others do, too.
It's not possible to load URLs when I'm offline. Similar arguments
apply to people who are on dialup and use, e.g., fetchmail to pull
all their mail local and then read it offline. License texts are
also generally fairly small, so the additional download time is
negligible.
Web sites can change, go 404-compliant, etc. If people are reading
the list archive a year or so from now, those events are fairly
likely. If the website has changed, much confusion will result;
if it has vanished, it can be hard to find a new source of the
information.
People who aren't interested in license texts probably aren't on
this mailing list, so there is minimal chance of filling up
mailboxes with unwanted junk --- especially since licenses are
small.
If you're not running a web browser, starting one can take a fair
amount of time, especially on a slower or memory hungry machine.
For these reasons, I believe we should ask for license texts, and other
relevant, small documents, to be posted inline instead of being linked.
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