Re: Vagueness of what is ‘substantial’ in the Expat license.

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:

> I would like to make a small comment about the “Expat” license, that
> personally I would not recommend when proposing a relicensing, because
> of the following sentence:
>
> ‘The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
> included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.’
>
> It is not easy to guess what each author will expect to be
> “substantial”.

I would expect that to be determined by what is substantial for
copyright law (i.e. whether the portion is substantial enough for
copyright to obtain) in any given jurisdiction.

Your point is well made, though, that it is ambiguous as written.

-- 
 \         “Alternative explanations are always welcome in science, if |
  `\   they are better and explain more. Alternative explanations that |
_o__) explain nothing are not welcome.” —Victor J. Stenger, 2001-11-05 |
Ben Finney