Re: ~OT Licens(?:es)(?:ing)

I don't consiter that this is at all OT in the light of Professional Employees and Works for Hire.

tilley's unfortunate circumstances have focussed the minds of many in the open source world on legal issues, especially on this site.

Most stuff I have seen, apart from shipping a LICENSE file in the kit, contains a sentence such as

This software is licensed under the terms of the GNU public licence, see ...
This software is licenced under the same conditions as Perl itself.

Surely you can dispense with the verbosity by simply referring to the correct place. I'm no legal expert - do we have any monks with the appropriate knowledge?

--rW

Comment on Re: ~OT Licens(?:es)(?:ing)

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Re: Re: ~OT Licens(?:es)(?:ing) by belg4mit (Prior) on Mar 22, 2002 at 11:19 UTC
Well you are still supposed to distribute the license (even if as seperate file as you mention). But there's the other matter of restrictions, granted the Artistic or MIT comes closest. I guess another concern of mine is I wish to express as little as possible because most of what even the simplest licenses lay out seems to be so much "common sense". `-- perl -pe "s/\b;([st])/'\1/mg"`	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: ~OT Licens(?:es)(?:ing) by kal (Hermit) on Mar 23, 2002 at 08:56 UTC
Even your licence has restrictions. For you to be able to impose your will - even if that will is "no-one will impose restrcitions on this software" - you have to claim the copyright. Hence, you need a copyright notice, and that notice needs to propogate with the software. Don't underestimate the importance of correct licencing. We know the tilly story. We know stories of people taking "free" code and making proprietary software out of it. We also know of examples of people licensing their software with a licence they don't understand - see the popular UK firewall team who think that their software shouldn't be copyable, even though it is GPL'ed. Get the licence right, it saves a lot of trouble later...	[reply]