4 ms·

What do you propose?

ebg13 8y ago
Something well defined for starters. Ideally something measurable without deferring to subjectivity. The entire point of a license is to make it clear to both sides what things are allowed under what circumstances. Who is the arbiter of practicality? Who makes that call? Which actions qualify needs to be completely clear to both sides because the rightsholder needs an assurance that your license has teeth and the other side needs an assurance that your license isn't capricious.
- kemitchell 8y ago
  You've given me qualities of an ideal proposal, but no actual proposal. I suspect because that level of perfection cannot exist. If there were a superior alternative to drop in, we would drop it in! More generally, I don't think violations will play out as you expect. We have experience with this kind of provision, under licenses like GPLv3, much more often under breach-termination provisions found in many kinds of contracts. Section 8 of GPLv3 may sound more precise for using legal dialect, but that language, like "cure" and "cease all violation", isn't really more precise. For example, to "cease" violating GPLv3, do I have to go back and fix my past transgressions? How? If not, why does the following paragraph say "cure"? Does "cure" apply to future violations? Or does "cure" just point back to "cessation" in the previous paragraph? All of this is actually quite alright, because by the time the licensor and licensee are in direct communication, it's within their power to settle the matter on their own terms, and not necessarily those of the license. Obviously, the licensor is the arbiter of practicality, up to the point where they decide to bring a claim or not. But the broad terms of the excuse provision give the licensee leverage and breathing room. The language does what we want, which is put the licensor and licensee in an interactive process toward resolution, and not in pre-litigation mode. There is nothing capricious about paving a path back to compliance, despite breach, in a public open source software license. Quite the opposite. The effect of the term is to prevent capricious claims for injunctions and money damages against licensees who may have unknowingly, or even perfectly innocently, violated it terms. That kind of mousetrap claim, and copyright trolling, are possible under MIT, BSD, and even Apache 2.0, which lack excuse rules for their attribution conditions. This looks to me like a case of shooting the honest messenger. Blue Oak has made this kind of term more transparent, in plainer language, with less reliance on the (false) mystique of legalese. Now that you can read the term, and the clear expectation is that you can and will understand it for yourself, you see the actual mechanism. And it isn't perfect precision, total lack of ambiguity, or a quasi-mathematical formula. That doesn't exist in practical legal terms.

Something well defined for starters. Ideally something measurable without deferring to subjectivity. The entire point of a license is to make it clear to both sides what things are allowed under what circumstances. Who is the arbiter of practicality? Who makes that call? Which actions qualify needs to be completely clear to both sides because the rightsholder needs an assurance that your license has teeth and the other side needs an assurance that your license isn't capricious.

kemitchell 8y ago
You've given me qualities of an ideal proposal, but no actual proposal. I suspect because that level of perfection cannot exist. If there were a superior alternative to drop in, we would drop it in! More generally, I don't think violations will play out as you expect. We have experience with this kind of provision, under licenses like GPLv3, much more often under breach-termination provisions found in many kinds of contracts. Section 8 of GPLv3 may sound more precise for using legal dialect, but that language, like "cure" and "cease all violation", isn't really more precise. For example, to "cease" violating GPLv3, do I have to go back and fix my past transgressions? How? If not, why does the following paragraph say "cure"? Does "cure" apply to future violations? Or does "cure" just point back to "cessation" in the previous paragraph? All of this is actually quite alright, because by the time the licensor and licensee are in direct communication, it's within their power to settle the matter on their own terms, and not necessarily those of the license. Obviously, the licensor is the arbiter of practicality, up to the point where they decide to bring a claim or not. But the broad terms of the excuse provision give the licensee leverage and breathing room. The language does what we want, which is put the licensor and licensee in an interactive process toward resolution, and not in pre-litigation mode. There is nothing capricious about paving a path back to compliance, despite breach, in a public open source software license. Quite the opposite. The effect of the term is to prevent capricious claims for injunctions and money damages against licensees who may have unknowingly, or even perfectly innocently, violated it terms. That kind of mousetrap claim, and copyright trolling, are possible under MIT, BSD, and even Apache 2.0, which lack excuse rules for their attribution conditions. This looks to me like a case of shooting the honest messenger. Blue Oak has made this kind of term more transparent, in plainer language, with less reliance on the (false) mystique of legalese. Now that you can read the term, and the clear expectation is that you can and will understand it for yourself, you see the actual mechanism. And it isn't perfect precision, total lack of ambiguity, or a quasi-mathematical formula. That doesn't exist in practical legal terms.