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

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Tue Jul 6 06:47:58 CEST 2010

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.

(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)

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