peddrenth asks:
"Software licenses are, we keep saying, difficult to read. The public clicks OK without reading, either implicitly trusting or mistrusting us the software authors. There have been calls recently for companies to clean-up the license, to bullet, section, and colour their licenses, to remove THE UPPERCASE
and to draw charts and graphs to explain the license. Anyone who's had to read a 3-page document in a 3"x1" textbox knows how useful this would be. The GPL is one of the most important licenses in the world, and appears on thousands of products. Everything from windows programs to operating systems to people's artwork requires understanding and acceptance of the GNU GPL. Should we, the free software community, take the first step in this effort, and show the world what an easy-to-read license looks like? Would it be useful if long textual software licenses stood out like a sore thumb amongst the cool, pretty, and clear free licenses?" Many may think the GPL Preamble to be clear enough, and this may be true. However there are a lot of people out there that would like to read the
entire license so that they know exactly what they may be getting into,
before they agree to it. This usually implies being able reading the actual license, and not just the preamble.
"Should we use such a comparison to show the public how they're being manipulated by terms in a EULA they don't read or understand, and encourage other license-writers to include the graphs and tables themselves, showing the public what a license really means?
What would be your ideal license, what poster would you draw to explain the GPL to a child, a PHB, or an artist? Would you stick with the text, or can you think of anything better?"
jamie interjects: The root of the problem is that "intellectual property" is a kludge of a natural human understanding of property rights. Useful, but a kludge. You have to invent many
oddball concepts
to keep up the pretense that ideas are property. The GPL is a kludge (strict and precise licensing terms) implemented on top of a kludge (copyright law) and, in English or in code, there is no short and simple way to describe complex things.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. The BSD/MIT style licenses give you this right, for which reason advocates of those licenses claim that they're "more free" than the GPL. I'm not sure if I agree with the point, but there are licenses that give the first-generation user more rights than the GPL. The argument is then over whether those rights are more valuable than the GPL's protection of second and later generation users.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
So if you changed from upper case to bold italic lower case, you would very likely face a legal challenge that your notice was not "noticable", and you would have to fight that throught the court hierarchy. However, once somebody did do this, then others could use that as precedent.
I have to disagree. It is the complexity that allows loopholes. Something that is complex is more easily interpreted differently. Something that is clear and simple leaves no room for alternate interpretations. Which of these leaves more room for interpretation?
2+2=4
The ANSWER is equal to the SUM of the FIRST NUMBER and the SECOND NUMBER, where the FIRST NUMBER has the same value as the SECOND NUMBER. IF AND ONLY IF the SECOND NUMBER has the value of the SECOND POSITIVE INTEGER, the ANSWER will have the value of the FOURTH POSITIVE INTEGER.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
You need not agree to a license in order to use this software.
The installation should somewhere contain copyright information, warantee disclaimer (which the user is not required to approve), and a link to the GPL. See also How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at