discuss: LDP Licence: a post-2.0 modest proposal
Subject:
Re: LDP Licence: a post-2.0 modest proposal
From:
Rick Moen ####@####.####
Date:
22 Dec 2003 12:53:10 -0000
Message-Id: <20031222125308.GO1166@linuxmafia.com>
Quoting jdd ####@####.####
> however, taking this into account is really writting a 3.0 licence and
> should not be done without extreme care.
Caution's good. But let's consider what the risks are.
1. Risk of issuing fewer permissions than the copyright holder intends.
This might happen if, say, some key rights grant privision was held
by a court to be unenforceable. While unfortunate, this could be
immediately cured by the copyright holder, through issuing a new
instance of the work with that provision repaired in whatever way
the court indicates.
2. Risk of issuing more permissions than the copyright holder intends.
E.g., a court might rule the copyleft (aka ShareAlike) provision
unenforceable for some reason, which would permit (unintended)
proprietary forks, against the copyright holder's wishes. While
even more unfortunate, this excessive rights grant would cease with
that version: The maintainer would issue subsequent editions under
a repaired licence.
3. Risk of unanticipated legal liability. This would a be much more
serious problem than the other two, but fortunately is even more
unlikely, because courts courts are awfully unlikely to assign
liability to copyright owners of works handed out for free, in any
event, and there's a 20 year history of this not being done for
licences like the BSD and MIT/X licences.
(I may be missing something. Those are all I could think of.)
As you can see, the first two cases, if they happen at all, get
dispensed with by issuing new copies under a revised licence. The third
just isn't likely at all, especially if one follows the successful
pattern of some of the long-time licences. The LDP 2.0 licence struck
me as a nice, neat little liberal copyleft licence, with some features
that make it particularly suited to the LDP. That is, it requests but
doesn't demand certain courtesies towards the current document
maintainer from those who are considering forking the document.
It had a few small (but non-serious) misfeatures and outdated references,
so I polished (just) those up a bit, without changing anything else.
So, I think you have a time-proven licence there, and I hope I've
improved it just a little, by doing that.
> now I probably would prefere creative common ones. these ones seems very
> carefully written and LDP could probably recommend one (not to reinvent
> the wheel)
<shrug> That train's sort of already left the station, since LDP's had
its own licence in various forms for at least six years, and almost
certainly a lot longer. And you'll note that it hasn't caused problems
(other than some people arguing about it). That's not a guarantee of
quality, but over time should come to mean something, at least.
> to speak on a functional way, all the ldp document should be classified
> in two packages (symbolicly, by flags, not on the disk):
>
> * documents that can be given to an other author if unmaintained
> * other documents.
Yes, good idea!
--
Cheers, We write precisely We say exactly
Rick Moen Since such is our habit in How to do a thing or how
####@####.#### Talking to machines; Every detail works.
Excerpt from Prof. Touretzky's decss-haiku.txt @ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/
