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

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 6:47 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> 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.

Really? That's the *last* thing where I would be looking for trust.
among developers. Open source licenses do take part into a trust
relationship -- however it is trust between corporate entities with
too many lawyers who wouldn't trust the open source development
communities otherwise. Their worries are mainly about people
contributing tainted material to open source projects which then later
can be used to place pressure on deep pockets (see the SCO UNIX suit
for example).

A secondary reasoning for some open source licenses might be to
prevent others from running off with the good stuff and selling it for
profit. The GPL is big on that, but it's never motivated me with
Python (hence the tenuous relationship at best with the FSF and GPL
software).

> (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)

There are two systems. The courts and the lawyers. The lawyers are the
most important -- they control the backroom deals and trust. The
courts are mostly there as a back-up threat since even winning a
lawsuit is incredibly expensive compared to settling.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)