Re: Licenses on CPAN

It seems pretty clear from this response, Chris, that you're not actually
interested in discussing licensing.  That's certainly your perogative; I
don't particularly enjoy having to work out the legal intricacies either.
You are instead interested in discussing the fact that you dislike the
law, the way the law is applied and interpreted, and the necessity for
having software licenses.

While I'm sure this is an interesting discussion, it's not one that I
personally have time or inclination to get into, particularly here, so I'm
going to bow out of arguing that with you.

It remains true, in my opinion, that software licensing is a question of
law, and that strongly and indignantly refusing to discuss questions of
law is likely to result in poorly chosen licenses.  Like it or not, we do
have to deal with the law.  I find it a bit disingenuous of you to jump
into a discussion of licensing with much vigor and strongly stated
opinions and then to refuse to actually discuss licensing, but that's just
my opinion and you're welcome to ignore it.

The AL is not known to be legally a free software license, and more
lawyers have expressed doubt about it than about the more commonly used
free software licenses.  You again can certainly choose to write off those
opinions that disagree with your opinion as biased if you choose; I think
that's short-sighted, but at this point given the tone of your last
message I think it's somewhat unlikely that you're going to listen to me.

I guess the root difference is that I care more about ensuring that we can
avoid the legal system than you seem to.  You're expressing willingness
for people who care about the legalities to waste their time in court; I
find that a very negative aspect to any license or license-like text and
would go out of my way in choosing a license to make sure that won't be
necessary.

(This again is why I prefer the MIT license to most of the alternatives;
it's so utterly simple and straightforward that even though it's written
legally, it's still understandable by the average reader.  It's almost
certainly enforceable and binding in court if *any* license is, since it
doesn't try to do anything at all complex.  The additional freedoms that
it offers are ones that I find it very unlikely that anyone would attempt
to take advantage of, at least for small-scale bits of software, so I have
no qualms about recommending it over the AL as an excellent license for
smaller packages for people who dislike the GPL.)

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