[Python-Dev] Licensing // PSF // Motion of non-confidence (original) (raw)

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Tue Jul 6 05:58:26 CEST 2010

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 fact is, in the U.S. if an ordinary person thinks they understand a license, then it's probably quite unpredictable what a court will say about attempts to enforce it.

WTF-an-economist-defending-lawyers??!?!!-ly y'rs,

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