On Tue, 6 Jul 2010 01:58:26 pm Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Antoine Pitrou writes:
Which is the very wrong thing to do, though. License text should be understandable by non-lawyer people;
This is a common mistake, at least with respect to common-law systems. Licenses are written in a formal language intended to have precise semantics, especially in the event of a dispute going to court. What you wrote is precisely analogous to "a computer program should be understandable to non-programmer people".
You've never used Apple's much-missed Hypertalk, have you? :) Given that Python has often been described as executable pseudo-code, I think it is ironic that you're implying that comprehensibility of language is a bad thing! Python is no less precise in its semantics than (say) APL. There are movements to discourage unreadable legalise in favour of simpler language that is more readable while still being precise. For example, the Canadian Bar Association supports the Plain English Movement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_Language_Movement and of course excessive formality and legalise is often criticised even by lawyers for *harming* precision. (When even the judge can't work out what you mean, that's a problem.) None of this is to imply that the Python licence is guilty of such excessive legalise. But I think that, to the extent that other priorities and legal obligations permit it, we should always be be open to the idea of improving the readability and comprehensibility of "legal source code".
The fact is, in the U.S. if an ordinary person thinks they understand a license, then it's probably quite unpredictable what a court will say about attempts to enforce it.
I'm not sure that this is a fact or just an opinion, but *my* opinion is that this is a safe bet. Most people in the industry consider that it's generally unpredictable what a court will say about licences in general (particularly the shrink-wrap variety). It's certainly true that the general public generally has no clue about licences, contracts, or legal agreements in general, but then agreements written by lawyers aren't always much better. I've been asked to sign agreements that are nonsensical, e.g. circular definitions where Clause N says to refer to Clause X, and Clause X says to refer to Clause N, or NDAs that prohibited me from doing *anything* with the "confidential information" the other party gave me, including the work they wanted me to do. Or blatantly illegal, e.g. non-compete clauses that don't have a hope in hell of surviving a legal challenge, including one that would have meant that I was agreeing to never work for any person or company in Australia who ever had with a telephone. -- Steven D'Aprano