Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:39:55 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

> Seriously, were they *trying* to prevent people from understanding it? If so, I don't think they could have done a better job. (At least not without hiring the FSF's "Let's do everything we can to enure our profession is needed as much as possible" lawyers.)

The rationale behind license text is to make it enforceable. If a lawyer cannot protect the author against infringement due to problems in the license text, the license is basically useless.

If you have problems reading the text, some authorities such as the Creative Commons provide shiny graphical interfaces to the license. Of course, I'm sure no one will complain if you release all your work under a very liberal license or don't limit the use in any way. It's always a pleasure to steal good work. "What's yours is mine, what's mine isn't yours" - that's how the communism worked.

"retard" <re@tard.com.invalid> wrote in message news:hrcokt$lkb$1@digitalmars.com...
> Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:39:55 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>
>> Seriously, were they *trying* to prevent people from understanding it? If so, I don't think they could have done a better job. (At least not without hiring the FSF's "Let's do everything we can to enure our profession is needed as much as possible" lawyers.)
>
> The rationale behind license text is to make it enforceable. If a lawyer cannot protect the author against infringement due to problems in the license text, the license is basically useless.
>

I'm seeing some vague references to zlib being unenforceable, but I've yet to see anything remotely substantial to back it up. Or even an unsubstantiated-but-direct claim for that matter. I have no way to be remotely sure your argument here isn't a strawman WRT zlib.

> If you have problems reading the text, some authorities such as the Creative Commons provide shiny graphical interfaces to the license.

I never touch "simplified" explanations. The actual text of the license itself *is* the legal document. That other stuff...isn't. If push came to shove, how can I sensibly assume that a court would place precedence on the unofficial simplified version over the actual license itself? I can't, so the simplified versions are useless to me.

> Of
> course, I'm sure no one will complain if you release all your work under
> a very liberal license or don't limit the use in any way. It's always a
> pleasure to steal good work. "What's yours is mine, what's mine isn't
> yours" - that's how the communism worked.

Why stop at communism? Let's just invoke Godwin's law outright. That'll prove a point. "You're argument is like Nazism." There. That makes my argument the winning one now, right?

-------------------------------
Not sent from an iPhone.

Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Don" <nospam@nospam.com> wrote in message news:hrclc9$gjg$1@digitalmars.com...
>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> "Walter Bright" <newshound1@digitalmars.com> wrote in message news:hrcbrr$2t7e$1@digitalmars.com...
>>>> Moritz Warning wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Maybe you can talk to the Tango devs to clear up this matter?
>>>> I suggest that the Tango devs convert the Tango modules that can get full agreement by their respective devs be converted to the Boost license. The Boost license is free of the legal problems that BSD has, and is compatible with the Phobos license.
>>> It looks like the Tango devs are pretty much settled on BSD-only with some hack to get around the binary attribution thing: http://www.dsource.org/projects/tango/ticket/1701  (*Shrug*, well, at least it's not as insanely verbose and impenetrable as Apache 2.0...)
>>>
>>> I *hate* licenses...(That's why I use the zlib one, none of the public domain problems, all of the freedoms that I've been told Boost offers, and none of Boost's idiotic over-verbosity.)
>> Yeah, we all feel the same way.
>> But I don't think the boost license is verbose. It's 4% of the length of the GPL:
>>
>> zlib:     957 characters
>> boost:    1361 (1/3 of which comes from US legal requirements).
>> Apache2:                 9219
>> Academic free license3: 10332
>> GPL 3:                  32069
> 
> Saying a license isn't verbose because it's much shorter than the GPL is like saying a particular restaurant is good just because it's better than eating out of a dumpster.

Well, there's not many places to eat in this town, outside of the dumpsters. Boost and zlib were the only ones I found.

> Seriously, were they *trying* to prevent people from understanding it?  If
> so, I don't think they could have done a better job. (At least not without hiring the FSF's "Let's do everything we can to enure our profession is needed as much as possible" lawyers.)

Have you read the rationale statement for the Boost license? (on the boost website).

The really appalling one is the OSI license. There's a huge document which purports to explain the license, but it doesn't explain it at all. It's just a polemic against the GPL. The FSF is much clearer than the OSI.

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:17:03 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

> The actual text of the license
> itself *is* the legal document.

Yes.

> That other stuff...isn't. If push came
> to shove, how can I sensibly assume that a court would place precedence
> on the unofficial simplified version over the actual license itself? I
> can't, so the simplified versions are useless to me.

It's just there to guide you. They promise that the license works in expected ways if you liked the graphical explanation. It's like a higher order abstraction in programming languages. If you think CC doesn't work, direct your complaints to Larry Lessig, not me. My goal is just to make you use the most liberal license so I can steal as much as possible. It's only benefical to me if you don't care about licensing.

> Why stop at communism? Let's just invoke Godwin's law outright. That'll prove a point. "You're argument is like Nazism." There. That makes my argument the winning one now, right?

Of course you win. Playing the Nazi card always wins.

"Don" <nospam@nospam.com> wrote in message news:hrcpir$ob3$1@digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Don" <nospam@nospam.com> wrote in message news:hrclc9$gjg$1@digitalmars.com...
>>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I *hate* licenses...(That's why I use the zlib one, none of the public domain problems, all of the freedoms that I've been told Boost offers, and none of Boost's idiotic over-verbosity.)
>>> Yeah, we all feel the same way.
>>> But I don't think the boost license is verbose. It's 4% of the length of
>>> the GPL:
>>>
>>> zlib:     957 characters
>>> boost:    1361 (1/3 of which comes from US legal requirements).
>>> Apache2:                 9219
>>> Academic free license3: 10332
>>> GPL 3:                  32069
>>
>> Saying a license isn't verbose because it's much shorter than the GPL is like saying a particular restaurant is good just because it's better than eating out of a dumpster.
>
> Well, there's not many places to eat in this town, outside of the dumpsters. Boost and zlib were the only ones I found.
>

Hee hee :)

>> Seriously, were they *trying* to prevent people from understanding it?
>> If
>> so, I don't think they could have done a better job. (At least not
>> without hiring the FSF's "Let's do everything we can to enure our
>> profession is needed as much as possible" lawyers.)
>
> Have you read the rationale statement for the Boost license? (on the boost website).
>

I have, but I just read through it again to make sure I didn't miss anything.

The only part of my complaint that it seems to address is the all-caps section. But even with that, all it actually says is "Capitalization of these particular provisions is a US legal mandate for consumer protection. (Diane Cabell)" and provides no source and no further details about the mandate. (BTW, Figures that the US gov would require consumer-protection text to be in a form that's well known to be difficult to read, and then try to pretend that doing so is somehow in the consumer's best interest instead of corporate best interest.)

I did find this bit interesting though:
"Do I have to copyright/license trivial files? Even a test file that just
contains an empty main() should have a copyright. Files without copyrights
make corporate lawyers nervous, and that's a barrier to adoption."

Going by what's said there, I think I actually *like* that. And by that I mean, using one blanket license file for the whole source and not being explicit in every individual file. As much as I dislike about the GPL, I've actually always been somewhat conflicted about it. I hate the verbosity, viral nature, inhibits adoption, inability to make much use of GPLed stuff when I've been working in a real commercial environment, etc. But, I love that it prevents the aiding of proprietary corporate crap. If some big corporation is going to try to push some closed-off crap (like Apple's iP*'s, cell phones, just about any game console, and software that I need to be able to rely on even if the company goes down or chooses to drop support), then I *want* them to be forced to re-invent everything (which they'll inevitably do poorly) to help keep the door open for a better, less anti-consumer, competitor. So if there's something that's only flaw is that it makes corporate lawyers nervous, I'd say that sounds like a step closer to having the best of both worlds: keeping proprietary corporate crap out of the loop *without* actually being viral.

> The really appalling one is the OSI license. There's a huge document which purports to explain the license, but it doesn't explain it at all. It's just a polemic against the GPL. The FSF is much clearer than the OSI.

Good to know. I wasn't really familiar with that one.

-------------------------------
Sent from my PC while pretending that people care what it's sent from.

On Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:34:19 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:

> Moritz Warning wrote:
>> On Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:24:22 -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
>> 
>>> Moritz Warning wrote:
>> [..]
>>>> Maybe you can talk to the Tango devs to clear up this matter?
>>> I suggest that the Tango devs convert the Tango modules that can get full agreement by their respective devs be converted to the Boost license. The Boost license is free of the legal problems that BSD has, and is compatible with the Phobos license.
>> 
>> As far as I have heard, Tango changed it's license to be compatible with Phobos in the first place.
> 
> Tango is originally based on Phobos code, and I gave explicit permission for it to be incorporated into the Tango project & BSD license, but the BSD license does not permit code to flow the other way without the explicit permission of the Tango devs.
> 
> Some code has moved back to Phobos, in particular Sean & Don's work, because Sean & Don are the developers of that code and it is their prerogative to do what they please with it.
> 
> 
>> But Phobos then changed it's license and now it's incompatible again. What were the reasons for Phobos to change the license? I suspect is was discussed before, do you have a link?
> 
> Phobos was formerly actually a collection of different licenses, Phobos 1.0 still is. Some was public domain.
> 
> The reason it was switched (for Phobos 2) to Boost was:
> 
> 1. Boost is corporate and lawyer approved, making it a no-brainer for commercial, professional use of Phobos
> 
> 2. Boost is the most liberal license we were able to find
> 
> 3. Public domain is not recognized in many countries
> 
> 4. Having one license for Phobos makes it much easier to manage and deploy
> 
> The perennial problem with the BSD license is the binary attribution clause. Tango believes it has a solution to this by embedding the appropriate string in object.d, but I don't know if this has been legally tested and it still puts a constant burden of explanation on the Tango team.
> 
> It's just a problem that I can see no reason to adopt.

Thank you for the explanation! :)

Andrei Alexandrescu さんは書きました:
> On 04/29/2010 09:39 AM, SHOO wrote:
>> Andrei Alexandrescu さんは書きました:
>>> Thanks! You are now a Phobos developer.
>> I'm happy to join member of Phobos developer!
>>
>>  > Unfortunately you cannot commit
>>> your changes to std.date because it infringes on Tango's license.
>>>
>>> Andrei
>>
>> What did I infringe the license of Tango for? For interfaces? For
>> implements?
>> I've written the codes without the intention. Please tell me the points
>> that are the problem.
> 
> I don't know other details except that a Tango representative explicitly warned us about the potential infringement yesterday. You may want to check with the Tango team. I am sorry for the disappointment this must entail to you.
> 
> The current direction considered for std.date is to take the design of Boost.Date_Time as a starting point.
> 
> http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_42_0/doc/html/date_time.html
> 
> 
> Andrei

Hmm...
OK, I'll try to rewrite it.
I'll thoroughly eliminate codes that resembles Tango's one by the next contribution. And I intend to refer to boost::time.

Unfortunately, I cannot reply for a while so that there is a schedule.

Bye.

> Phobos was mostly public domain, which has legal problems (eg in Japan). The boost license is the closest equivalent to public domain.

I would be interested to hear the problems of public domain, as I used the WTFPL as an equivalent.

On 2010-04-30 05:02:27 -0400, SHOO <zan77137@nifty.com> said:

> Hmm...
> OK, I'll try to rewrite it.
> I'll thoroughly eliminate codes that resembles Tango's one by the next contribution. And I intend to refer to boost::time.

If you want something concrete to restart your effort, you could use the TimeSpan/DateTime construct I've posted at the start of this thread. I guaranty it isn't based on Tango, as I've never took a look at Tango's date/time module. I got inspired from boost a little (because I've used boost::date_time a lot in the past), but I haven't copied it either.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin@michelf.com
http://michelf.com/

On Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:02:27 +0900, SHOO wrote:

> Andrei Alexandrescu さんは書きました:
>> On 04/29/2010 09:39 AM, SHOO wrote:
>>> Andrei Alexandrescu さんは書きました:
>>>> Thanks! You are now a Phobos developer.
>>> I'm happy to join member of Phobos developer!
>>>
>>>  > Unfortunately you cannot commit
>>>> your changes to std.date because it infringes on Tango's license.
>>>>
>>>> Andrei
>>>
>>> What did I infringe the license of Tango for? For interfaces? For
>>> implements?
>>> I've written the codes without the intention. Please tell me the
>>> points that are the problem.
>> 
>> I don't know other details except that a Tango representative explicitly warned us about the potential infringement yesterday. You may want to check with the Tango team. I am sorry for the disappointment this must entail to you.
>> 
>> The current direction considered for std.date is to take the design of Boost.Date_Time as a starting point.
>> 
>> http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_42_0/doc/html/date_time.html
>> 
>> 
>> Andrei
> 
> Hmm...
> OK, I'll try to rewrite it.
> I'll thoroughly eliminate codes that resembles Tango's one by the next
> contribution. And I intend to refer to boost::time.
> 
> Unfortunately, I cannot reply for a while so that there is a schedule.
> 
> Bye.

Hi,

have you thought about just asking the authors of the Tango code in
question?
I would imagine they would say that they only see a minor resemblance in
the api and asking wouldn't even be necessary from their point of view.

But since W/Phobos is very copyright sensitive, I'm sure they will give the permission.