Re: licensing issues

David Grove <[email protected]> writes:

> I'm suggesting licensing only as a necessary first step. It's a document
> where we put on paper (or in bits and bytes) what the nature of our
> "spirit" is. Without this as a groundwork, there's very little to base
> further action and policy on.

Given that licenses should be lawyer-proof, or at least lawyer-resistant,
this may not be the best place to put down the intended spirit of one's
community.  There are a lot of constraints forced by making something a
legal document.  Regardless of one's opinions of the substance of either,
it's worth noting that part of the reason why the GPL is as successful as
it is and as legally sound as it is is that the "spirit" document is
completely separate (the GNU Manifesto).  This even had the unintended
side-benefit of making the GPL usable for people who didn't even agree
with the intended spirit (the Manifesto).

You may have a good point here.  Perhaps we want a Perl Manifesto that
lays out our base goals in plain English, separate from any licensing
scheme.  At the least, it could serve as documentation for *why* Perl is
dual-licensed, since this keeps coming up.

> All law in my country (the United States) is, in one way or another,
> based upon a single document, our Constitution.

As a somewhat off-topic side note, I feel like I should point out that
this isn't true.  State law is based on the 50 state constitutions, which
sometimes have a different basis than the federal Constitituion.
Furthermore, large chunks of the American legal system and its basic
principals are based on British common law in 49 of the states, which both
predates and is not anywhere close to being enumerated by the
Constitution.  You'll find that the Constitution in several places assumes
the basis of British common law, such as in the Seventh Amendment that not
only refers to the right of trial by jury without bothering to define what
a jury is but even explicitly refers to common law in the second clause.

To further complicate things, I believe that Louisiana's legal system is
still based on the French civil code, which is an entirely different legal
tradition.  (This is why self-help books for writing legal documents such
as wills generally include statements that the results may not be valid in
Louisiana and that residents of Louisiana should consult legal counsel
there.)

A good introduction to the basis of law in the United States and its
varied sources of authority is at <http://www.lectlaw.com/files/env02.htm>.

This is somewhat relevant to the topic at hand because licenses, being
arguably a subset of contract law, are to some degree based on common
rather than statutory law in the United States and in some other western
countries.  That means that you can't necessarily figure out everything
you need to know about software licenses just by reading relevant law; the
basis of common law is legal precedent, which isn't as conveniently
collected.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email protected])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>