Re: Differentiating BSD-style licenses
Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
> Le Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 09:57:05AM +1100, Ben Finney a écrit :
> > I've advocated making mnemonic descriptors for the particular
> > clauses, e.g. “attribution”, “no endorsement”, etc. Those have the
> > disadvantage of not being well-known, but the advantage (compared to
> > simply counting the clauses) that at least a guess as to which
> > clauses are being referenced will likely be right.
>
[…]
> This leaves the issue raised by Ben, that the permission given by a
> license can not be inferred by its short name.
Not quite. If one wants to know what the exact permissions are, one can
read the license text. I'm raising the issue that referring only to the
*number* of clauses doesn't make clear *which* license text one should
read.
Using mnemonic names (as inspired by the Creative Commons mnemonics for
their clauses), instead of total count, for clauses would make it
clearer which license terms one is referring to. Actually knowing what
the terms are is then a matter of reading the terms; but the reference
needs to be sufficiently unambiguous that one can be confident one is
reading the same license terms as were referred to.
--
\ “… it's best to confuse only one issue at a time.” —Brian W. |
`\ Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie, _The C programming language_, |
_o__) 1988 |
Ben Finney
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