RE: Lawyers and licenses

> From:	Chris Nandor [SMTP:[email protected]]
> 
> At 11:22 -0400 2000.09.12, Adams, Johnnie W wrote:
> 
	>>	Speaking strictly for myself, I think anyone who tries to
write a
> >>legally binding document without the help of a lawyer is a
> self-destructive
> >>fool, and I have the scars to prove it.
> 
	> Why would you say that, when not one person here suggested such a
thing?  Odd.

	Well, yesterday, after Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
	
	"I have been talking with Eben Moglen, a prominent law professor at
Columbia University, and he is willing to help us in developing some
proposed new versions of the Artistic License."

	you responded:

	"That sounds really bad.  The last thing we need in here is a lawyer
helping us out.  Lawyers should come last."

That's not quite what I said above, but it's close enough in spirit for my
comment to apply.

The time you want a lawyer involved is when he or she can do you the most
good, and that's often at the beginning of a project, _before_ you've dug
yourself into a hole.

I guess I'm just disturbed at anyone-bashing. A fair number of the people I
know who hate lawyers also hate anyone who works with a computer, and
usually for the same reasons. There is probably a lawyer out there,
somewhere, who _aches_ to see Perl prosper and who would do a great job of
helping rework the license, just on principle. There are a fair number of
people who enter any powerful profession for reasons of idealism, and some
of them even manage to maintain it. Having been given more than my share of
free, useful legal advice from lawyers who fit that pattern, I suggest that
we find a _good_ (in every sense of the word) lawyer and let him or her
help.

If someone in the legal profession wants to contribute what he or she knows
to help Perl, why resist it so?

I suspect the reason for this resistance is that it covers the fact that
people neither agree on what they want in a license nor know what is
possible to achieve with a license. Without clarity on those two points (the
second of which screams for legal advice), how can there be progress on a
license? So, instead, let's lawyer-bash.

	John A