On Jan 3, 2006, at 9:07 AM, c wrote:
What's the advantage of using unclear laws instead of clear free licenses such as MITX11 and SIBSD ?
theyre good if you are into obfuscation and ambiguities and want to weed out those in your userbase who care about a clear license. there are those who just dont care (me being one, i know yves would rather spend his time and money making tea for hugo chavez and not waste it on silly lawyers...)
You bring up a good point here about lawyers. Most lawyers pretend that the law is free (as in beer) when talking about things like copyright license terms. The talk about all sorts of clauses to licenses as if they were easy to enforce, and that justice will just automatically reign upon us. (Sadly, I think Lawrence Lessig is a victim of this line of thinking with his Creative Commons licenses).
But the reality is that the law is really expensive. So if you have an attribution clause in your license and a large corporation uses your software without attributing you, are you going to spend US$10,000 to sue them to force them to? All you'd get it attribution, and it'd actually cost you US$10,000. That's how much it costs to sue large corporations, it can often cost a lot more. Why do you think that all the people sued by the RIAA for downloading settled out of court? Their settlements were cheaper than fighting to clear their names in court, even if they were totally innocent, as some of them were. And that's exactly what RIAA is counting on when they sue people.
Another example of a similar situation is a clause like "Not for military or repressive use." By legal standards, it is vague. What is the legal definition of "repressive use"? Is that the same definition that the author intended? A vague statement is even more expensive to defend in court. So now, let's say a military organization uses the software. In order to stop them, you have to take them to court, which will cost a lot of money.
But if that same software had been released under the GNU GPL, then even though that military would be allowed to use the software, they would have to release any of their additions under the GNU GPL. In the vast majority of GPL violation cases, a letter from a lawyer is enough to get the sources released since it is well established in courts and has the clout and lawyers of the Free Software Foundation behind it. Then instead of spending precious money on court fees fighting the military org, it could be spent on much more productive things, and also, that military org would be contributing to the development of the software that you use to fight them.
So the choice really seems to be between an idealistic expression and an actual benefit. Even though I believe in such idealistic expression, I think that copyright license are not the place for it because its counter productive to the ideals expressed.
.hc
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