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



On Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:03:12 +1100 Ben Finney wrote:

> 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.

I've always interpreted the Expat license this way.
I cannot think of any other reasonable interpretation: maybe it's just
lack of fantasy on my side...

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

I don't think the Expat license is ambiguous: I find the above-quoted
sentence pretty clear, instead.


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