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Re: Hacking License



On Fri, 7 Dec 2018 at 23:02 Giacomo <giacomo@tesio.it> wrote:
[...]
So basically that definition is there to prevent discrimination against any group or minority or even against  people affected by genetic issues and so on.

Why not just say 'people'?

To my mind the biggest problem with this license is that by trying to be precise you're just introducing additional ambiguities. But this doesn't make things better --- in fact the converse; I can read a sentence and think I know what it means, but in fact don't because you've redefined the term.

Example: you redefine 'Human' to have a non-standard meaning. But then you never refer to the word 'Human' ever again; instead you refer to 'human'. In other cases where you redefine a word you use the capitalised form, which makes it clear that you're referring to the redefined form. So when you say 'human', do you mean your redefined 'Human' or the conventional term?

(And remember that the license text needs to stand up on its own --- you won't be around to explain it to me!)

('Use' is even worse. As far as I can tell, from your definition looking at a floppy disk containing a copy of your software counts as Use. But it's not clear whether a User is someone who Uses the software or not.)

After having read this several times, I still can't figure out what your actual intent is. What makes this different from other copyleft licenses? Do you really need your own license?

Remember that custom licenses cost serious money to work with: if I'm an organisation who wants to use your software, I need to book actual lawyer time to get an analysis done, and that's before we know whether it's compatible with our existing code. It's so much easier to just use someone else's software instead!

If you do, and of course it's your choice to do so, I would urge you to write down, in one simple sentence, what you actually want to achieve, why existing licenses don't do this, and then try to modify an existing license to do what you want, rather than starting from scratch. It'd be much easier to understand and less ambiguous.

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