:: [DNG] Please don't introduce yet mo…
Top Page
Delete this message
Reply to this message
Author: Rick Moen
Date:  
To: dng
Old-Topics: Re: [DNG] fifth freedom
Subject: [DNG] Please don't introduce yet more 'crayon licences' (was: fifth freedom)
Quoting onefang (onefang_devuan@???):

> I had recently added what I call freedom -1 to the licence of
> apt-panopticon.


The price of using peculiar, and in particular one-off, licensing is
that many people will forego even looking a second further at your work,
as it's easier to do so than to do licensing review.

FYI (and separately from that), your addition to what would have
otherwise been 2-clause BSD serves only to protect against a
noonday-midnight, i.e., the action you claim to forbid is inherently
impossible by basic operation of copyright law. I.e., the granting of
access to reserved rights under copyright law is itself a reserved right
(available only to the copyright owner, in this case you) under
copyright law. It's neither necessary nor useful to do the legal
equivalent of swinging a dead chicken to ward off theft of that legal
monopoly.

On OSI's license-discuss and license-review mailing lists, we call
these sorts of things 'crayon licences', and as illustration of why most
programmers really shouldn't try to draft licences, any more than most
lawyers should try to code major software projects.


> I even mention the alteratives that I know of in the docs, so that's your
> fifth freedom catered for.


Which reminds me: If coders feel they really cannot help themselves and
must include manifestos, _please_ put them in the docs and not as
disfigurings of otherwise useful and standard software licences. Why?
Isn't avoiding hapless obscurity for your codebase reason enough?