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.
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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?
Licenses are lengthy, wordy, and hard to read for a reason. They try to ensure that no "loophole" can be made. The simpler you make the license, the more likely lawyers can "see multiple meanings in words", and avoid the license entirely.
IMHO, the free-software licenses SHOULD be wordy, because companies like Microsoft have lawyers constantly looking for a loophole...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
One of the things that's nice about the GPL, and that I've just come to understand recently, is that it doesn't really matter if you 'accept' it, in the sense that you accept a EULA from MS. Since accepting the GPL actually gives you MORE freedoms than the normal copyright laws, if you don't accept the GPL on a program you get, you are actually more limited in what you can do with it. You can't distribute it, and surely can't distribute a modified version.. Whereas the other EULAs restrict you in addition to copyright restrictions, the GPL actually reduces the restrictions put upon you by copyright law.
Most of what the majority of non-lawyers need to know about the GPL can be summed up in one line:
The GPL does not impact users of the software, only distributors.
That's it. For that simple reason, the premise of this question is flawed. Most of the world simply uses software and doesn't redistribute it, therefore understanding and acceptance of the GNU GPL is not an issue.
Anyone who is distributing software (GPL or otherwise) really needs to take the time to understand the details of their redistribution agreement. As redistribution licenses are concerned, the GPL is very easy to understand and truly does stand out as a marvel of simplicity. The only simpler things are BSD and public domain :-)
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Before the preamble, state:
Or is that too simplistic?
Note that this does not accomplish one important end, in that it does not clearly distinguish itself from other EULAe, except that it devotes the first few sentences to "freedoms" rather than "limitations".
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Where you need to worry about the implications of the GPL are if you're a) a developer or b) a loudmouth who complains about alleged GPL violations. Come to think of it, you don't need to know anything to be a loudmouth who complains about alleged GPL violations.
By the way, Jamie and Michael, if you have something to say, please post it instead of giving yourselves an automatic (Score: 6, Editor).
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Licenses are naturally complex things.
The problem is that we're using licenses to begin with. We don't need licenses. Books don't have licenses. Poems don't have licenses. Music, despite the RIAA's wishes to the contrary, doesn't have licenses.
There are in essense only three sets of rights available to the recipient of any copyrighted work:
1) Rights previously granted under Copyright Law.
2) 1 + additional rights
3) 1 - rights already granted
Only number 3 requires a license, because only number three has to be agreed to by the recipient. This is a EULA.
Number one doesn't need any license at all. Just put the words "Copyright 2002 Joe Schmoe, all rights reserved" at the top, and you're done. 90% of commercial software could be released like this with zero problems for the authors. This is known as simple copyright.
Number two doesn't need a license either. You're granting additional rights, not taking anything away. Even if these additional rights have conditions attached to them, as with copyleft, the recipient does not need to agree to anything, because they cannot excercise those additional rights outside of the context of those conditions. I refer to this as a Permission Statement.
The general public, over the course of three decades of concerted brainwashing by the software industry, has come to believe that you need a license to use software. This is very sad. Instead of perpetuating this myth, we need to be proactive and declare that the user doesn't have to agree to any damn thing to use the software we gave them!
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Well, no. It's "if you redistribute our stuff with your stuff in certain ways (all of which are clearly defined in a one of the most readable license documents you'll ever see), you won't be covered by this license. In which case, you'll have to explain to a judge why you violated our copyright."
After all, users are never forced to sign any kind of agreement to the GPL. If you didn't sign a license, nobody can force you to agree that you were bound by the contract. But without the license to redistribute granted by the contract, you may pay a penalty for violating the authors' copyright.
Anyway, if your legal staff can't figure out the terms of the GPL, then god help you with the proprietary licenses you're dealing with.
You should go get an MCSE certification yourself, then. In the same way that an MCSE cannot talk about the GPL in a well-informed manner, you are not seen as qualified to speak on things Microsoft. I have certifications in both Microsoft and Linux (among others), so when I advocate the use of Open Source over Microsoft products, people are apt to believe that I know the pros and cons of both, and have made a well-informed analysis.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.