[Python-Dev] Licensing // PSF // Motion of non-confidence

[Antoine Pitrou]

Le mardi 06 juillet 2010 à 12:58 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull a écrit :
> 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".

The point of free software licenses, though (as opposed to proprietary
licenses), is not mainly to go to court (to “protect IP”, as the PSF
says - quite naively in my opinion); it is to enable trust among people.
Hence the requirement for being readable and understandable by the very
people whom they help work together.

(and besides, of course, a lawyer's opinion can never make you sure of
anything wrt. court testing; lawyers very frequently disagree between
themselves, and they are very careful to never provide any formal
guarantee; for example, several French “IP” lawyers have argued that
free licenses have no value in French authorship right; that hasn't
prevented companies from making business with the GPL and other free
licenses here)