Re: [ode] [rms@gnu.org: Re: Updating the OpenContent license]


Gregory Leblanc (gleblanc@cu-portland.edu)
Thu, 20 Jan 2000 23:01:58 -0800


Richard Stallman wrote:
>
> It is unreliable not to include the license in the work that it
> covers. Over the years, they could get separated; then the user would
> have no clear statement of his or her rights. Things are changing so
> fast that it is impossible to be confident that any particular URL
> will still work five years from now. It is hard to be confident that
> URLs will make any sense twenty years from now.

I tend to feel that this will get in the way of using the license. I
would rather that the license NOT require the full license to be in it's
text, but require it to be included with any versions of the text that
are distributed. This would simplify things for collections and
web-based resources, as they would only need to include 1 copy of the
license, and have all refernces point to the copy included. Source
formats for the documents could be distributed with the license attached
without much effort on the part of the author. I'm not sure that I've
thought this completely through, but having such a long license appear
in the text of my work seems like a pain.

>
> Perhaps someday, if free software becomes greatly accepted,
> these licenses will be available from official sources, and
> we could refer to it just as we refer to the US Constitution
>
> How does one use such a license for a 1 page short
> document (or even a man page)?
>
> For a one-page short document, I would suggest using a very simple
> license like the X11 license. For a very small document, the
> benefit of copyleft is small too.

I'm not sure that I agree with you here. Small documents don't
necessarily mean that they have a small ammount of information, just
that the information they contain is very dense. There could be many
many hours of work put into a two page article, but using the GNU
license in that text would double (or more?) the length of the article.
        Greg



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