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TldrLegal – Software Licenses Explained in Plain English

321 points by kissgyorgy 13y ago

rjf90 13y ago
This is awesome. There are a lot of things I love about this country, but one thing we've done bad is create lawyers. Where I live (DC) 1 in 12 people are lawyers. I wish every legal document carried a tl;dr.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  If you don't like a life with lawyers, you'll be terrified about a life without them. The problem is not lawyers. It is that we* made them important. * or they made themselves important, but whatever, the problem is not their nominal work.
- rayiner 13y ago
  America inherited its legalistic nature from England. Uncoincidentally, the U.S. and England are two of the most successful societies in the history of the world. :)
  - watwut 13y ago
    Citation needed.
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    This sounds like a massive case of mixing correlation with causation.
    - rayiner 13y ago
      Of course its difficult to separate correlation from causation on this subject. The best study I've seen on the matter (Magee, "The Optimum Number of Lawyers") doesn't try to detangle the correlation and the causation too much, though it does try to account for a number of other variables. That said, its hard to ignore the track record of Anglo law. England was able to embrace a market economy earlier than its competitors in part due to its legalistic fixation on property rights. It had well developed legal structures suitable for bringing private money into the tasks of colonization and empire building. Its interesting to note that as China modernizes its economy, it is bringing over American legal experts to update its legal system.
      - enraged_camel 13y ago
        Okay, now you seem to be setting up a strawman. Yes, legal frameworks that support things like property rights are important. The parent, however, was making a point about how the law has gotten overly complex over the decades, so much so that we now have an entire cadre of people whose sole job is to help others navigate that complexity. It doesn't help that most legal documentation is written in bizarre, arcane language, as opposed to plain, spoken English.
        rayiner 13y ago
        It's not a straw man, because I'm not using "no law" and "no property rights" as the basis of comparison. Non-Anglo countries still had law and property rights. What Anglo countries had, and have, are very sophisticated legal systems and legalistic societies that leverage the legal system for more purposes. It's one thing for a farmer to be able to sue someone who takes his land. It's another for farmers to be able to hedge against bad harvests by entering into contracts and having the contracts traded as property rights on derivatives exchanges. The complexity and sophistication of Anglo legal systems readily support the complex and sophisticated corporate, financial, and insurance transactions that underly modern economies. It's not a coincidence that the world's three largest financial centers, New York, London, and Hong Kong, are all common law jurisdictions based on English common law. And complaining that legal contracts are written in "bizarre, arcane language" seems to me to be like a high level manager complaining about programs being written in C++ or Javascript, instead of plain spoken English. After all, why do you need so many lines of this "code" when he just explained precisely everything the program should do in 15 minutes?
        enraged_camel 13y ago
        >> What Anglo countries had, and have, are very sophisticated legal systems and legalistic societies that leverage the legal system for more purposes. It's one thing for a farmer to be able to sue someone who takes his land. It's another for farmers to be able to hedge against bad harvests by entering into contracts and having the contracts traded as property rights on derivatives exchanges. I think of a country's legal system as a computer program. Anglo countries have been developing their program for a long time. Therefore, it can do a ton of different things, including allowing farmers to hedge against bad harvests in the manner you describe. One problem is that, as programs get more sophisticated, they also become slower, and you end up needing to throw more resources at them to make them run at acceptable performance. This becomes an issue when not every user can afford those resources: what you end up with is some people running the program at state-of-the-art hardware (i.e. rich people who can afford expensive legal representation), and others running it on decades-old hardware (i.e. public defenders). When these groups are pitted against each other (e.g. in a lawsuit), one group dominates, either by using the threat of litigation to force the other side to do something or by winning the trial. Complexity in programs also cause other problems. For example, as a program gets more complex, it becomes harder to maintain and debug. If you write new code, you have to make sure it won't conflict with any of the old functionality. It becomes harder to test, harder to bring new people up to speed, and harder to train users because there's just so much the program can do. The problem is that, while you can refactor a program's code, you can't necessarily refactor the legal system: it just gets more and more complex, with no end in sight. >>And complaining that legal contracts are written in "bizarre, arcane language" seems to me to be like a high level manager complaining about programs being written in C++ or Javascript, instead of plain spoken English. After all, why do you need so many lines of this "code" when he just explained precisely everything the program should do in 15 minutes? Programs are written in programming languages because that's what computers understand. If you wrote the program in plain spoken English, it would not run. However, user documentation of the program is written in plain spoken English because that's what the user speaks. The phrase, "To create a new account, click the 'Register' button," does not require the user to hire a specialized, highly-paid professional who will interpret it for him. The law is like, or should be like, user documentation, because it is ultimately consumed by humans. Therefore it makes sense to write it in a language that most humans will understand. Right now though, it is written in the equivalent of a programming language, which is why we need lawyers to make it understandable. It really is ridiculous, if you think about it.
ketralnis 13y ago
"iTunes" has no results. So I searched "Apple Terms" like the autocomplete suggests, and get "Nothing summarized yet". No "Fulltext" for that one either. Why suggest it if you don't have it? I also can't click the back button from "https://tldrlegal.com/license/apple-terms-of-service#changesets/active" https://tldrlegal.com/license/apple-terms-of-service#changes..., it seems to send me right back to itself.
- XiZhao 13y ago
  Hey, tldrlegal creator here. Glad to see feedback popping on HN again! Here's some answers: 1. You're totally right about ToS. Tldrlegal was just code and OSS licenses for a while -- I just added terms of service and the apple tos today. They're in the autocomplete to just feature both types but you're right -- it's irresponsible to suggest that before it's ready. 2. The back button issue is just a redirect one from the js routing on that page. The reason is because it defaults to the first tab link, which is kept as an anchor for js-disabled loaders. Thanks for the notes!
  - beggi 13y ago
    It's not just suggested as autocomplete, it's actually given as an example of a search on the front page, just FYI.
  - quadrangle 13y ago
    Please don't just duplicate work that is already being done. Partner with http://tosdr.org/ http://tosdr.org/ instead
    - freudien 13y ago
      These are kids building this product in Silicon Valley. I'm surprised there isn't more work done already -- this industry is notorious for having operating inefficiencies. But hey, that's what a free market is, right? Let the market decide which competitor is best. These guys are funded and need to generate that return, right?
shortsightedsid 13y ago
I met a lawyer at LinuxCon Europe last year. One thing interesting she said was that of all the other professions, a software developer was the closest to actually understanding legalese. That's because devs understand if-then-else, switch-case, variables etc.. That's exactly what the legal language style is. Whereas, said party....
- tzs 13y ago
  They may be good at parsing the syntax of legal text, but in my experience software people are worse than "typical" people at understanding the meaning. My hypothesis is that programming gets them used to thinking about things in absolute terms, and they cannot deal with the fuzziness inherent in law.
  - patio11 13y ago
    This is partially because developers have a cultural quirk where they believe that, e.g., "file sharing is not theft"/"manipulating a URL can't be a crime"/"laws about disclosing protected information invariably contain a public policy exception which comports to the temperament of the dev community" are axiomatic and thereby create an internally consistent legal system which fails to falsify those axioms but also fails to meaningfully resemble the legal system we actually operate in. This results in developers sincerely believe things like "Your Bitcoins are unprotected by the legal system because nobody can steal a number", which is a proposition that is absurd to the legal system as "JavaScript is not a programming language" is to a programmer.
    - icebraining 13y ago
      developers have a cultural quirk where they believe that, e.g., "file sharing is not theft" Yeah. Thankfully, the SCOTUS shares our cultural quirk, as Dowling v. United States showed.
      - loumf 13y ago
        This was a ruling in 1985 based on physical theft laws being applied to copyright. <s>It also never made it to the Supreme Court.</s> (edited -- sorry misread this part) Since then, many other laws have been passed, and it's likely that SCOTUS would apply those rather than using this case as a precedent. They didn't make a sweeping judgement about the meaning of copyright -- only declared that a laws about theft did not apply to copyright. Specific Copyright laws passed after 1985 would probably still apply. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985)
LukeB_UK 13y ago
I saw this linked somewhere else months ago and keep forgetting about it. Extremely useful if you really don't want to read through a large license file to see if you can use a library in a project or not.
Strilanc 13y ago
I noticed that the BSD 2 has a 'CANNOT' group that says: > Hold Liable > Describes the warranty and if the software/license owner can be charged for damages. which reads awkwardly. It's like someone was describing the category "Hold Liable" instead of what the BSD2 license says about liability. Most of the descriptions have this problem. Something like "The software/license owner can't be charged for damages or shortcomings." might flow better, though that implies having descriptions for both the positive and negative case. edit Oh, normally the descriptions are hidden (with scripts enabled). So it's as if I asked "what is it?" by clicking and the description is the answer. That makes more sense.
- XiZhao 13y ago
  You can suggest changes to any page! Just hot the edit button after you login!
jaxomlotus 13y ago
Great domain! See what we did here, where every paragraph is summarized in human readable English.: http://aviary.com/legal/terms http://aviary.com/legal/terms I do think offering this as a service for most companies would be a very useful (if small) business.
- drdaeman 13y ago
  I really wonder whenever it's possible to write TOS/EULA/alike without the legalese part, just with plain simple wording and human-friendly style. Had any lawyer experimented with that, or that's just not possible?
  - jaxomlotus 13y ago
    It's probably possible, but trials are decided on the letter of the law, not the spirit. It's easier for a lawyer to write in legalese then stress about making human readable words cover all the scenarios legalese was intended to cover.
kudu 13y ago
I wish the Apache License was more popular. It's in the same spirit as the MIT License, but it provides more protections regarding patents, for example. This prevents the "bait and switch" method of licensing a work under a permissive license but restricting it under patent law.
- jedbrown 13y ago
  But it can't be used by software that chose BSD, MIT, MPL, LGPLv2.1, GPLv2, or other common licenses. This is fairly benign for an end-user application, but it's a restrictive choice for libraries. This is a handy chart: http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html
  - belorn 13y ago
    Apache is compatible with every one of those licenses except gplv2-only. Section 4 of the apache license says: "You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole" - https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html It can't be relicensed, but people has argued that you can't do that with BSD or other permissive licenses. You can't take BSD code and make it MIT, which restricts a MIT project if they want to only use the MIT license.
    - jedbrown 13y ago
      I don't interpret that to mean that you can violate the terms of the Apache license, but rather that modifications or derivative work can bear a different license. Every user is still bound by the terms of the Apache license, including the patent indemnification clause which does not appear in those other licenses. If you disagree, could you point me to a legal opinion? Note that OpenBSD still ships Apache 1.3 because they believe Apache 2.0 is incompatible. http://monkey.org/openbsd/archive/misc/0402/msg01095.html http://monkey.org/openbsd/archive/misc/0402/msg01095.html
Springtime 13y ago
Looks promising. Not sure what I think of the concept of a 'Manager' (user who was the original submitter) being the only one to approve changes, seems a bit odd considering the rest of the community aspect. A similar site, tosdr.org, was launched a couple years back to help filter through website TOS. It lacks a community editable system, and even with various publicity and funding still has a limited set of sites in their index. Hopefully this new site can gain more traction and continue to develop.
- XiZhao 13y ago
  Yeah, TLDRLegal is actually older than ToS;DR, and I noticed that the community there kinda stagnated because editing was so difficult. I don't know what happened to them after they got their 10k from indiegogo, but I think they're still around. The idea of "managers" is to keep an authority reviewing the content since legal info is sensitive and can be very impactful to people, but TLDR admins can always transfer management from one person to another.
  - jarofgreen 13y ago
    Interesting point about mangers being an authoritative source, but if the manger is just the first user isn't that a bit arbitrary? Good luck anyway!
STRML 13y ago
Cool site! I really appreciate this information, you did a great job. I just wanted to remark on a few UI bits that drove me nuts: 1. The social links. Not only are they not necessary, but there appears to be a bug with the Facebook widget (Chrome 35, OSX) that causes it to be about 1000px tall and invisibly cover the entire "Newest" column, making all of them unclickable. 2. The expansion of the 'rules' sections on hover. Not only is that information not really useful in that format (tiny text, difficult to read, too terse to be useful), the expansion makes it difficult to click on what you want. It may be best to either omit them or leave them expanded by default. Thanks for a useful site!
- XiZhao 13y ago
  Thanks for the feedback, I actually really agree with the rules comment. The old browse ui had these click filters on rules like 'commercial use' that let you filter on licenses based on rules. The new ui had to retire that for a bit, but i had requests to keep the rules at least which was easy enough to do. Unfortunately it's difficult to leave them a open as it drastically skews how the columns are aligned. I'll keep brainstorming.
ChronosKey 13y ago
Minor nitpick: `i.e.` should be `e.g.` in this case (for the search field's hint).
dalek2point3 13y ago
I'm surprised there is no entry for ODbl -- https://tldrlegal.com/search?q=odbl https://tldrlegal.com/search?q=odbl
einhverfr 13y ago
It is an interesting project and likely useful. At the same time, I wonder how clear the descriptions are, particularly of the permissive licenses (this is a critique, not a teardown). I looked at the FreeBSD and MIT licenses because of the fact that there is a subtle difference in the licenses which can cause some confusion: the MIT license explicitly allows sublicensing while the BSD licenses do not. The descriptions were good. The MIT description was exactly the way I read the license text. The 2-clause BSD/FreeBSD license said "you can do almost anything" which immediately raises the question of "what can't you do?" My reading of the license is that the answer is "sublicense" (i.e. you can include the work in product of a different license, but you cannot change the license on the BSD code in the process of transmitting it, and that this limitation does not exist in the MIT license, were you can not only change the license but likely assert status as licensor when you do so). IANAL, but this is the sense I get from Larry Rosen's book ont he subject. Again, I don't know that licenses can be perfectly explained in plain English, so this is a fairly minor concern if the site exists primarily as a conversation starter rather than something that people want to use as some sort of authoritative reference.
anjbe 13y ago
I have to take issue with TldrLegal’s summary of the ISC license: https://tldrlegal.com/license/-isc-license https://tldrlegal.com/license/-isc-license It starts out with, “The ISC license is not very well regarded because it has an “and/or” wording that makes it (debatably) legally vague.” Um, really? There is only one person who thinks that: rms. The ISC license isn’t the most popular permissive license, but it is reasonably common, being used by several large organizations (like, well, the ISC), and of course by a number of people for personal projects. So aside from it not being copyleft, why _does_ rms (and thus the FSF licenses page) dislike the ISC license? Well, the ISC and Pine licenses both contain the following wording: “Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software… is hereby granted…” University of Washington apparently tried to claim that this disallowed distribution of modified versions of Pine. Of course, that interpretation is completely ridiculous, as evidenced by 1) the reaction on debian-legal https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/11/msg00138.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/11/msg00138.html and 2) the large number of people who use the license to this day. But because _one_ copyright holder interpreted those words in a way that nobody else does, the FSF has claimed ever since that any license using such wording is dangerous (not nonfree, just dangerous). Which is silly. Anyone can misinterpret a license—I have seen several people release code under the GPL and then try to claim that prevents commercial redistribution. Would the FSF list that as a reason not to use the GPL? Of course not. Anyway, the thing that bothered me the most about the TldrLegal entry was the statement that it’s “not very well regarded.” More accurate would be to say “not well regarded _by the FSF_”, but even that wouldn’t paint the whole picture because it doesn’t account for organizations like OpenBSD or ISC who actively prefer it. By the way, here’s some interesting reading from Paul Vixie about the history of the ISC license: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.protocols.dns.bind/D8VLXloVfxc/4yweyAjRCecJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.protocols.dns.bin... In response to the noise made by the FSF, the ISC changed the “and” to “and/or,” though of course that didn’t change the FSF’s mind at all. OpenBSD still uses the “and” wording.
- XiZhao 13y ago
  Tldrlegal creator here. Good points, your depth of understanding on this license has really illuminated on how lacking or misleading the current summary can be. Do you think you can suggest some alternative working using the edit button on the site? I will merge your changes in ASAP.
swatkat 13y ago
Check out EULAlyzer as well: https://www.brightfort.com/eulalyzer.html https://www.brightfort.com/eulalyzer.html
JoshTriplett 13y ago
This seems quite nice. Two things I'd love to see, which would make it even more handy: - I'd love to see each license that has a standard SPDX identifier (https://spdx.org/licenses/ https://spdx.org/licenses/) include that identifier as metadata in its tldrlegal record. (And ideally tldrlegal.com should have a standard URL to reach the one-and-only license corresponding to a given SPDX identifier.) - I'd love to see standardized tags for OSI-compliant Open Source licenses, GNU-approved Free Software licenses, GPLv2-compatible licenses, and GPLv3-compatible licenses. (For the latter two, it'd be interesting to have a generalized tagging mechanism for saying "compatible with (other license record)", but in practice those are the two cases that matter most, and too much generality might not be a good thing.) Also, this site seems to be doing something with icon fonts that doesn't work: I see missing-character glyphs for characters F098 and F099 where Facebook and Twitter icons should appear, and an "fl" ligature where a search button should appear. (Firefox 27 on Linux, in case that matters.) I also don't see the placeholders on the username, email, and password fields in the form that pops up when clicking the "Sign Up" link; the placeholders in the form on the front page do appear. (Consider using real labels rather than placeholders for forms like that, to make them more accessible.)
- Argorak 13y ago
  The Firefox issue is a classic indicator that the site would work in Firefox with one additional step and the creators didn't bother checking. In this case: Firefox expects CORS to load fonts from a different domain, e.g. CloudFront. https://coderwall.com/p/ub8zug https://coderwall.com/p/ub8zug The other classic is that Firefox expects fonts to be served with the correct mine-type.
  - XiZhao 13y ago
    Thanks Argorak, that was just inexcusable laziness from my side -- thanks for bringing it up.
    - Argorak 13y ago
      Also not meant as an offense ;). Its just so telling... Thanks for taking note.
notastartup 13y ago
what is the best license where you maintain the brand name of the open source software, and allow end user to modify it according to their needs but not release it under a different brand name OR use it to run commercial services off the software (that will require commercial license) ?
- icebraining 13y ago
  Do you really want people releasing code under your brand? In any case, a license with such restrictions is considered non-free, so you won't find them on the OSI or FSF. There's CC-BY-NC, but they don't recommend applying it to software. I don't know if there's any other freely usable license with such terms, you may need to pay a lawyer to write you one. Or you could ask, say, the MAME developers if they license you theirs: http://mamedev.org/legal.html http://mamedev.org/legal.html
sushijain 13y ago
Very useful.
mlubin 13y ago
Very cool. Missing LGPL v3. I've been looking for a clear explanation of how it differs from LGPL v2.1.
- XiZhao 13y ago
  Feel free to submit it to the site using the link on the top right!
XiZhao 13y ago
Hey guys, tldrlegal creator here. Just a quick note -- I am really glad to see discussions about license interpretations here, this is exactly what I hoped for when I first started the project. As a reminder on tldrlegal you can give feedback using the black tab on the right and also suggest a change to any license page by editing it when you're signed in! My biggest goal is to make sure content on tldr is of the highest quality and I'm really grateful that you guys are taking the time to critique and raise questions about the ways things have been summarized. Many of the summaries are outdated, and the best way for you guys to get your thoughts integrated is to use the editing features on the site! Tldr - you can edit license content on the site!
clarry 13y ago
Are there any actual lawyers behind this project? Or is it yet another site where every other guy from the Internet who thinks he knows what some license means decides to tell everyone else about it?
- masklinn 13y ago
  > Or is it yet another site where every other guy from the Internet who thinks he knows what some license means decides to tell everyone else about it? Anybody can edit the license summary and attributes, so it's literally "every other guy from the internet"
  - PhantomGremlin 13y ago
    So it's a lot like the following comment which I grabbed from somewhere on the Interweb: "Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information." - Michael Scott
  - clarry 13y ago
    Well I didn't try that, but other comments here say that you may suggest changes which then must be approved by a manager. But even if anyone could post and edit content without any approval process, the content could still be heavily moderated after the fact. So my question still stands.
aleem 13y ago
Could you keep the badges expanded instead of on hover? It would make for easier comparison.
NAFV_P 13y ago
Software licences for dummies - hell, I'm mostly clueless about this so I had a good look. One point I will make is that as soon as you read the relevant material on this site, you have to go into a dark corner and read the small print. I've noticed the odd comment or two on this page mentioning lawyers. A bit expensive, but they're the most qualified people to talk to, bar (sorry, bad pun) judges. At college, I used to live with someone training to be a barrister. Whereas the average thickness of my maths and science texts is, say 500 pages, I saw one book on law hitting around 2,500 pages. It ranks alongside the London Knowledge for verbosity.
ExpiredLink 13y ago
Maybe I'm the only one but I don't find this overview convincing.
delinka 13y ago
"GPL v3 tries to close some loopholes in GPL v2." And what, in plain English, would those loopholes be?
- belorn 13y ago
  GPLv2 says: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.". GPLv3 explicit says: "not allow patents to restrict development and use of software" GPLv3 also say that you can not use hardware restrictions as a trick to circumventing the no-further-restrictions legal requirement. One could argue that GPLv2 already include everything GPLv3 do in form of that single line. Doing such interpretation would for all practical purposes upgrade every gplv2-only project to the same conditions as of GPLv3 (but with fewer license compatibilities). The FSF clearly decided not to go that route, and created the GPLv3.
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  The GPLv3 served two main purposes: 1) Prevent Tivoization[0]. As noted below, it could be argued that the GPLv2 already forbade this, but that is left up to legal interpretation (which did not always agree in practice). So they made this explicit in the GPLv3. 2) Allow interoperability between the different "flavors" of the GPL. The GPL comes in three "flavors" - regular, lesser, and Affero. Under v2, projects using the regular GPL could not be combined with projects using the Affero GPL. Under v3, all three of these can be safely mixed. (Essentially, for v3, each of the "flavors" includes an explicit exception for the other two, if I remember correctly). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
wreegab 13y ago
As a software developer, I want people to use my stuff. Once over the hurdle of writing something that people might find useful, I have to choose a license. When it's a library, I usually choose something without much restrictions, like MIT or Apache v2, or else developer will just go look elsewhere. However there is a project which is a full blown application, and I went GPLv3, because I want anybody to be able to use it, or fork it. However it would bother me if someone was using this project to earn money, as I personally forfeited deriving any income from this project (not even donations). Apparently GPLv3 allows commercial use (I didn't realize that when I picked the license). What license would best match my concerns?
- lambda 13y ago
  There are no common open source licenses which forbid commercial use, as that is against the various different guidelines for what constitutes open source or free software (the Free Software Foundation Free Software definition: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html, the Debian Free Software Guidelines: https://www.debian.org/social_contract https://www.debian.org/social_contract, or the Open Source Definition: http://opensource.org/osd-annotated http://opensource.org/osd-annotated). Probably the closest you can get in the form of commonly recognized license that meets those criteria is the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. It was designed for creative works (books, movies, music, and so on) rather than software, so it doesn't address some technicalities that come up in the software field, but it is a license which allows modification and redistribution but not commercial use. However, you have to ask yourself, why do you want to do this? Are you planning on selling the software commercially yourself? If someone else happens to make some money by adding features to your software and releasing them back to the community for anyone to use (which they are required to do under the terms of the GPL), does that actually hurt you? Or if they don't change it and just sell it straight, why would anyone buy that over the free version? Why did you voluntarily forfeit making any money, even donations? Would you accept donations if offered? How about accept a contract to add a particular feature? If you won't accept that, why would you want someone else not to be able to accept such an offer to add a given feature? If your users are willing to pay for development, but you don't want to accept the money, should someone else not be able to accept the money, put the work in, and release their changes under the same license? I would recommend sticking to the GPLv3. Most of the kinds of commercial use that are actually objectionable, like adding proprietary features and selling that version at a premium, are not possible under the GPLv3.
wes-exp 13y ago
I hate to be a party pooper, but I think this site is completely naïve from a legal perspective, and actually harmful. There are many ambiguities not covered by simple bullet point descriptions. Ask yourself, why are licenses long in the first place? I defer to the IT / Digital Legal Companion, by Gene K. Landy, an actual lawyer: "The Myth of the Two-Page Contract ... Many times a client has brought us a complex multiyear distribution deal and wanted a 'simple two-page agreement.' Sometimes, they even ask for a one-page deal! The ostensible goal is to cut down negotiation time. But for most negotiated deals, it is a myth that adequate contracts can be short in this way. If the lawyer tries to comply (and we have tried), the result will almost always be to make the deal ambiguous. ... Managing complex deals full of contingencies with as imprecise a tool as the English language is tough enough; it is not prudent to try (or force your lawyer to try) to make agreements more risky than they have to be." The sentiment could not be more clear: all that legalese is in the agreement for a reason. "Simplifying" licenses into bullet points does not adequately capture their content, and it is a huge UI fail to make people think that it does. Let's start with the site's treatment of GPLv3. You get a few bullet point labels about e.g. source code disclosure plus a three-sentence summary. "GPL v3 tries to close some loopholes in GPL v2." Oh, really, what are those loopholes? No discussion of code signing, patent rights, affero vs. non-affero, among many other issues. Even the bullet points themselves do not adequately capture nuance. That the GPLv3 allows commercial use is technically true, hence the label "commercial use". However, what isn't mentioned is the fact that the GPLv3 separately prohibits practically every known business model for profiting from software. These ambiguities are not minor issues; they are fundamental. Let's not wrongly give people the idea that complex licenses can be summed up with a few bullet points, any more than our technical work can be summed up with a few crappy analogies!
- clarry 13y ago
  I agree that oversimplifying is a problem and the devil is in the details. Having said that, I believe it's possible to present licenses in an easier-to-digest way by hilighting specifics and providing examples of real-world implications that different clauses carry with them, providing perspective from multiple different view points. There are many ways to do this, but one method would be to present the visitor with questions about what he intends to do (or intends to let others do) with code covered by a given license, and proceed to point out the relevant restrictions and obligations in that case. For example, do you intend to redistribute the work? In case of the 2-clause BSD license, this should hilight the fact that for binary distribution, you are obliged to include the license in documentation and/or other materials; and perhaps give examples of cases where this might be a problematic requirement. For GPLv2, it would have to go into detail about having to provide the source or a written offer (and then make sure you have the source around for three years!), etc. None of this is substitute for actually reading the license texet, but this sort of a resource could really help people understand points they glossed over, forgot, or somehow misunderstood, or whose implications (negative or positive) they did not realize. Add cross-references and people could really check their undestanding of the license text they've read. Actually, I was hoping this would be exactly that resource, and that is why I asked in another comment about whether there's any legal backing behind this project. Because if somebody is going to write an elaborate guide to some license, it'd better be good, and not based on common misconceptions.
bib971 13y ago
This is even a shorter tl;dr: use MIT or Apache. Who would choose other licenses, more complicated, if they didn't mean to screw you later.
- clarry 13y ago
  You could shorten that tl;dr by removing mention of the Apache license. Which is much longer and more complicated than the MIT license, and incompatible with GPLv2 (at least according to the FSF).
  - XiZhao 13y ago
    Yeah but Apache gives you an explicit grant to patent rights whereas MIT, although doesn't explicitly restrict it, doesn't grant it either.
gkya 13y ago
Now, I just glanced at the thing, and the very first thing that annoys me is this: Why would you require an account for submissions? Or rather, why would you need to have any kind of user accounts mechanism at this site? The second problem is that the combination of TLDR and legal. One should at least bother to skim through the license of a program they'll use. BSD/MIT are about 20 lines, and GPL3 is about 700 lines: % find /usr/share/licenses/common/ -name '*.txt' | xargs wc -l 470 /usr/share/licenses/common/MPL/license.txt 193 /usr/share/licenses/common/PSF/license.txt 151 /usr/share/licenses/common/PerlArtistic/license.txt 165 /usr/share/licenses/common/LGPL3/license.txt 88 /usr/share/licenses/common/EPL/license.txt 377 /usr/share/licenses/common/CDDL/license.txt 76 /usr/share/licenses/common/W3C/license.txt 68 /usr/share/licenses/common/PHP/license.txt 201 /usr/share/licenses/common/Artistic2.0/license.txt 661 /usr/share/licenses/common/AGPL3/license.txt 339 /usr/share/licenses/common/GPL2/license.txt 55 /usr/share/licenses/common/RUBY/license.txt 63 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-sa-3.0.txt 61 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-nc-3.0.txt 12 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-readme.txt 58 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-nc-nd-3.0.txt 60 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-3.0.txt 63 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-nc-sa-3.0.txt 57 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-nd-3.0.txt 502 /usr/share/licenses/common/LGPL2.1/license.txt 202 /usr/share/licenses/common/Apache/license.txt 217 /usr/share/licenses/common/CPL/license.txt 397 /usr/share/licenses/common/FDL1.2/license.txt 416 /usr/share/licenses/common/LPPL/license.txt 674 /usr/share/licenses/common/GPL3/license.txt 54 /usr/share/licenses/common/ZPL/license.txt 451 /usr/share/licenses/common/FDL1.3/license.txt 6131 total One need not be a lawyer to understand what this website offers with merely reading one of these. Also, there are Wikipedia articles for most the licenses, and OSI website is quite informative. This website is unnecessary.
- clarry 13y ago
  The uncountable flames on Web forums, the GPL FAQ, all the questions on the FSF IRC channel and so on are IMHO enough proof that licensing is complicated and people have trouble reading and understanding licenses. Correct & well laid out information about them is hard enough to find. I think a new website could help with that. It could also guide people in choosing a license for their code. Having said that, in its current state tldrlegal isn't much help.
kyberias 13y ago
Aargh! Fix that horrible "jumping of links when I try to click them" behaviour of the page.
owl_icecream 13y ago
This reminds me of - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJuXIq7OazQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJuXIq7OazQ "There is not one section... it's just the vibe of the thing" "I'm afraid Mr Denuto, you'll have to be more specific"
quadrangle 13y ago
It's totally stupid that this is not itself Open Source. Otherwise, it's got potential and probably is better than GitHub's choosealicense thing
- XiZhao 13y ago
  TLDR is actually older than choosealicense
  - quadrangle 13y ago
    Actually, I knew that, but I'd forgotten about it until now. My point still stands that it is otherwise better (it would be if it were Free/Libre/Open itself)
freudien 13y ago
Social media connect under "Follow tldr" is broken for me (Chrome 33 on OSX). Also, use "e.g." not "i.e." -- while similar, the contextually mean different things. The former is "for example", the latter is "for instance." Really gave me doubts to the integrity of the website if such a simple grammar mistake was made on the front page, in the call-to-action. Food for thought.
blueskin_ 13y ago
Seems to be missing a few, e.g. Apache 1.1.

321 points by kissgyorgy 13y ago

rjf90 13y ago

This is awesome. There are a lot of things I love about this country, but one thing we've done bad is create lawyers. Where I live (DC) 1 in 12 people are lawyers. I wish every legal document carried a tl;dr.

marcosdumay 13y ago
If you don't like a life with lawyers, you'll be terrified about a life without them. The problem is not lawyers. It is that we* made them important. * or they made themselves important, but whatever, the problem is not their nominal work.
rayiner 13y ago
America inherited its legalistic nature from England. Uncoincidentally, the U.S. and England are two of the most successful societies in the history of the world. :)
- watwut 13y ago
  Citation needed.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  This sounds like a massive case of mixing correlation with causation.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Of course its difficult to separate correlation from causation on this subject. The best study I've seen on the matter (Magee, "The Optimum Number of Lawyers") doesn't try to detangle the correlation and the causation too much, though it does try to account for a number of other variables. That said, its hard to ignore the track record of Anglo law. England was able to embrace a market economy earlier than its competitors in part due to its legalistic fixation on property rights. It had well developed legal structures suitable for bringing private money into the tasks of colonization and empire building. Its interesting to note that as China modernizes its economy, it is bringing over American legal experts to update its legal system.
    - enraged_camel 13y ago
      Okay, now you seem to be setting up a strawman. Yes, legal frameworks that support things like property rights are important. The parent, however, was making a point about how the law has gotten overly complex over the decades, so much so that we now have an entire cadre of people whose sole job is to help others navigate that complexity. It doesn't help that most legal documentation is written in bizarre, arcane language, as opposed to plain, spoken English.
      - rayiner 13y ago
        It's not a straw man, because I'm not using "no law" and "no property rights" as the basis of comparison. Non-Anglo countries still had law and property rights. What Anglo countries had, and have, are very sophisticated legal systems and legalistic societies that leverage the legal system for more purposes. It's one thing for a farmer to be able to sue someone who takes his land. It's another for farmers to be able to hedge against bad harvests by entering into contracts and having the contracts traded as property rights on derivatives exchanges. The complexity and sophistication of Anglo legal systems readily support the complex and sophisticated corporate, financial, and insurance transactions that underly modern economies. It's not a coincidence that the world's three largest financial centers, New York, London, and Hong Kong, are all common law jurisdictions based on English common law. And complaining that legal contracts are written in "bizarre, arcane language" seems to me to be like a high level manager complaining about programs being written in C++ or Javascript, instead of plain spoken English. After all, why do you need so many lines of this "code" when he just explained precisely everything the program should do in 15 minutes?
        enraged_camel 13y ago
        >> What Anglo countries had, and have, are very sophisticated legal systems and legalistic societies that leverage the legal system for more purposes. It's one thing for a farmer to be able to sue someone who takes his land. It's another for farmers to be able to hedge against bad harvests by entering into contracts and having the contracts traded as property rights on derivatives exchanges. I think of a country's legal system as a computer program. Anglo countries have been developing their program for a long time. Therefore, it can do a ton of different things, including allowing farmers to hedge against bad harvests in the manner you describe. One problem is that, as programs get more sophisticated, they also become slower, and you end up needing to throw more resources at them to make them run at acceptable performance. This becomes an issue when not every user can afford those resources: what you end up with is some people running the program at state-of-the-art hardware (i.e. rich people who can afford expensive legal representation), and others running it on decades-old hardware (i.e. public defenders). When these groups are pitted against each other (e.g. in a lawsuit), one group dominates, either by using the threat of litigation to force the other side to do something or by winning the trial. Complexity in programs also cause other problems. For example, as a program gets more complex, it becomes harder to maintain and debug. If you write new code, you have to make sure it won't conflict with any of the old functionality. It becomes harder to test, harder to bring new people up to speed, and harder to train users because there's just so much the program can do. The problem is that, while you can refactor a program's code, you can't necessarily refactor the legal system: it just gets more and more complex, with no end in sight. >>And complaining that legal contracts are written in "bizarre, arcane language" seems to me to be like a high level manager complaining about programs being written in C++ or Javascript, instead of plain spoken English. After all, why do you need so many lines of this "code" when he just explained precisely everything the program should do in 15 minutes? Programs are written in programming languages because that's what computers understand. If you wrote the program in plain spoken English, it would not run. However, user documentation of the program is written in plain spoken English because that's what the user speaks. The phrase, "To create a new account, click the 'Register' button," does not require the user to hire a specialized, highly-paid professional who will interpret it for him. The law is like, or should be like, user documentation, because it is ultimately consumed by humans. Therefore it makes sense to write it in a language that most humans will understand. Right now though, it is written in the equivalent of a programming language, which is why we need lawyers to make it understandable. It really is ridiculous, if you think about it.

ketralnis 13y ago

"iTunes" has no results. So I searched "Apple Terms" like the autocomplete suggests, and get "Nothing summarized yet". No "Fulltext" for that one either. Why suggest it if you don't have it? I also can't click the back button from "https://tldrlegal.com/license/apple-terms-of-service#changesets/active" https://tldrlegal.com/license/apple-terms-of-service#changes..., it seems to send me right back to itself.

XiZhao 13y ago
Hey, tldrlegal creator here. Glad to see feedback popping on HN again! Here's some answers: 1. You're totally right about ToS. Tldrlegal was just code and OSS licenses for a while -- I just added terms of service and the apple tos today. They're in the autocomplete to just feature both types but you're right -- it's irresponsible to suggest that before it's ready. 2. The back button issue is just a redirect one from the js routing on that page. The reason is because it defaults to the first tab link, which is kept as an anchor for js-disabled loaders. Thanks for the notes!
- beggi 13y ago
  It's not just suggested as autocomplete, it's actually given as an example of a search on the front page, just FYI.
- quadrangle 13y ago
  Please don't just duplicate work that is already being done. Partner with http://tosdr.org/ http://tosdr.org/ instead
  - freudien 13y ago
    These are kids building this product in Silicon Valley. I'm surprised there isn't more work done already -- this industry is notorious for having operating inefficiencies. But hey, that's what a free market is, right? Let the market decide which competitor is best. These guys are funded and need to generate that return, right?

shortsightedsid 13y ago

I met a lawyer at LinuxCon Europe last year. One thing interesting she said was that of all the other professions, a software developer was the closest to actually understanding legalese. That's because devs understand if-then-else, switch-case, variables etc.. That's exactly what the legal language style is. Whereas, said party....

tzs 13y ago
They may be good at parsing the syntax of legal text, but in my experience software people are worse than "typical" people at understanding the meaning. My hypothesis is that programming gets them used to thinking about things in absolute terms, and they cannot deal with the fuzziness inherent in law.
- patio11 13y ago
  This is partially because developers have a cultural quirk where they believe that, e.g., "file sharing is not theft"/"manipulating a URL can't be a crime"/"laws about disclosing protected information invariably contain a public policy exception which comports to the temperament of the dev community" are axiomatic and thereby create an internally consistent legal system which fails to falsify those axioms but also fails to meaningfully resemble the legal system we actually operate in. This results in developers sincerely believe things like "Your Bitcoins are unprotected by the legal system because nobody can steal a number", which is a proposition that is absurd to the legal system as "JavaScript is not a programming language" is to a programmer.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    developers have a cultural quirk where they believe that, e.g., "file sharing is not theft" Yeah. Thankfully, the SCOTUS shares our cultural quirk, as Dowling v. United States showed.
    - loumf 13y ago
      This was a ruling in 1985 based on physical theft laws being applied to copyright. <s>It also never made it to the Supreme Court.</s> (edited -- sorry misread this part) Since then, many other laws have been passed, and it's likely that SCOTUS would apply those rather than using this case as a precedent. They didn't make a sweeping judgement about the meaning of copyright -- only declared that a laws about theft did not apply to copyright. Specific Copyright laws passed after 1985 would probably still apply. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985)

LukeB_UK 13y ago

I saw this linked somewhere else months ago and keep forgetting about it. Extremely useful if you really don't want to read through a large license file to see if you can use a library in a project or not.

Strilanc 13y ago

I noticed that the BSD 2 has a 'CANNOT' group that says: > Hold Liable > Describes the warranty and if the software/license owner can be charged for damages. which reads awkwardly. It's like someone was describing the category "Hold Liable" instead of what the BSD2 license says about liability. Most of the descriptions have this problem. Something like "The software/license owner can't be charged for damages or shortcomings." might flow better, though that implies having descriptions for both the positive and negative case. edit Oh, normally the descriptions are hidden (with scripts enabled). So it's as if I asked "what is it?" by clicking and the description is the answer. That makes more sense.

XiZhao 13y ago
You can suggest changes to any page! Just hot the edit button after you login!

jaxomlotus 13y ago

Great domain! See what we did here, where every paragraph is summarized in human readable English.: http://aviary.com/legal/terms http://aviary.com/legal/terms I do think offering this as a service for most companies would be a very useful (if small) business.

drdaeman 13y ago
I really wonder whenever it's possible to write TOS/EULA/alike without the legalese part, just with plain simple wording and human-friendly style. Had any lawyer experimented with that, or that's just not possible?
- jaxomlotus 13y ago
  It's probably possible, but trials are decided on the letter of the law, not the spirit. It's easier for a lawyer to write in legalese then stress about making human readable words cover all the scenarios legalese was intended to cover.

kudu 13y ago

I wish the Apache License was more popular. It's in the same spirit as the MIT License, but it provides more protections regarding patents, for example. This prevents the "bait and switch" method of licensing a work under a permissive license but restricting it under patent law.

jedbrown 13y ago
But it can't be used by software that chose BSD, MIT, MPL, LGPLv2.1, GPLv2, or other common licenses. This is fairly benign for an end-user application, but it's a restrictive choice for libraries. This is a handy chart: http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html
- belorn 13y ago
  Apache is compatible with every one of those licenses except gplv2-only. Section 4 of the apache license says: "You may add Your own copyright statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole" - https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html It can't be relicensed, but people has argued that you can't do that with BSD or other permissive licenses. You can't take BSD code and make it MIT, which restricts a MIT project if they want to only use the MIT license.
  - jedbrown 13y ago
    I don't interpret that to mean that you can violate the terms of the Apache license, but rather that modifications or derivative work can bear a different license. Every user is still bound by the terms of the Apache license, including the patent indemnification clause which does not appear in those other licenses. If you disagree, could you point me to a legal opinion? Note that OpenBSD still ships Apache 1.3 because they believe Apache 2.0 is incompatible. http://monkey.org/openbsd/archive/misc/0402/msg01095.html http://monkey.org/openbsd/archive/misc/0402/msg01095.html

Springtime 13y ago

Looks promising. Not sure what I think of the concept of a 'Manager' (user who was the original submitter) being the only one to approve changes, seems a bit odd considering the rest of the community aspect. A similar site, tosdr.org, was launched a couple years back to help filter through website TOS. It lacks a community editable system, and even with various publicity and funding still has a limited set of sites in their index. Hopefully this new site can gain more traction and continue to develop.

XiZhao 13y ago
Yeah, TLDRLegal is actually older than ToS;DR, and I noticed that the community there kinda stagnated because editing was so difficult. I don't know what happened to them after they got their 10k from indiegogo, but I think they're still around. The idea of "managers" is to keep an authority reviewing the content since legal info is sensitive and can be very impactful to people, but TLDR admins can always transfer management from one person to another.
- jarofgreen 13y ago
  Interesting point about mangers being an authoritative source, but if the manger is just the first user isn't that a bit arbitrary? Good luck anyway!

STRML 13y ago

Cool site! I really appreciate this information, you did a great job. I just wanted to remark on a few UI bits that drove me nuts: 1. The social links. Not only are they not necessary, but there appears to be a bug with the Facebook widget (Chrome 35, OSX) that causes it to be about 1000px tall and invisibly cover the entire "Newest" column, making all of them unclickable. 2. The expansion of the 'rules' sections on hover. Not only is that information not really useful in that format (tiny text, difficult to read, too terse to be useful), the expansion makes it difficult to click on what you want. It may be best to either omit them or leave them expanded by default. Thanks for a useful site!

XiZhao 13y ago
Thanks for the feedback, I actually really agree with the rules comment. The old browse ui had these click filters on rules like 'commercial use' that let you filter on licenses based on rules. The new ui had to retire that for a bit, but i had requests to keep the rules at least which was easy enough to do. Unfortunately it's difficult to leave them a open as it drastically skews how the columns are aligned. I'll keep brainstorming.

ChronosKey 13y ago

Minor nitpick: `i.e.` should be `e.g.` in this case (for the search field's hint).

dalek2point3 13y ago

I'm surprised there is no entry for ODbl -- https://tldrlegal.com/search?q=odbl https://tldrlegal.com/search?q=odbl

einhverfr 13y ago

It is an interesting project and likely useful. At the same time, I wonder how clear the descriptions are, particularly of the permissive licenses (this is a critique, not a teardown). I looked at the FreeBSD and MIT licenses because of the fact that there is a subtle difference in the licenses which can cause some confusion: the MIT license explicitly allows sublicensing while the BSD licenses do not. The descriptions were good. The MIT description was exactly the way I read the license text. The 2-clause BSD/FreeBSD license said "you can do almost anything" which immediately raises the question of "what can't you do?" My reading of the license is that the answer is "sublicense" (i.e. you can include the work in product of a different license, but you cannot change the license on the BSD code in the process of transmitting it, and that this limitation does not exist in the MIT license, were you can not only change the license but likely assert status as licensor when you do so). IANAL, but this is the sense I get from Larry Rosen's book ont he subject. Again, I don't know that licenses can be perfectly explained in plain English, so this is a fairly minor concern if the site exists primarily as a conversation starter rather than something that people want to use as some sort of authoritative reference.

anjbe 13y ago

I have to take issue with TldrLegal’s summary of the ISC license: https://tldrlegal.com/license/-isc-license https://tldrlegal.com/license/-isc-license It starts out with, “The ISC license is not very well regarded because it has an “and/or” wording that makes it (debatably) legally vague.” Um, really? There is only one person who thinks that: rms. The ISC license isn’t the most popular permissive license, but it is reasonably common, being used by several large organizations (like, well, the ISC), and of course by a number of people for personal projects. So aside from it not being copyleft, why _does_ rms (and thus the FSF licenses page) dislike the ISC license? Well, the ISC and Pine licenses both contain the following wording: “Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software… is hereby granted…” University of Washington apparently tried to claim that this disallowed distribution of modified versions of Pine. Of course, that interpretation is completely ridiculous, as evidenced by 1) the reaction on debian-legal https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/11/msg00138.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/11/msg00138.html and 2) the large number of people who use the license to this day. But because _one_ copyright holder interpreted those words in a way that nobody else does, the FSF has claimed ever since that any license using such wording is dangerous (not nonfree, just dangerous). Which is silly. Anyone can misinterpret a license—I have seen several people release code under the GPL and then try to claim that prevents commercial redistribution. Would the FSF list that as a reason not to use the GPL? Of course not. Anyway, the thing that bothered me the most about the TldrLegal entry was the statement that it’s “not very well regarded.” More accurate would be to say “not well regarded _by the FSF_”, but even that wouldn’t paint the whole picture because it doesn’t account for organizations like OpenBSD or ISC who actively prefer it. By the way, here’s some interesting reading from Paul Vixie about the history of the ISC license: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.protocols.dns.bind/D8VLXloVfxc/4yweyAjRCecJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.protocols.dns.bin... In response to the noise made by the FSF, the ISC changed the “and” to “and/or,” though of course that didn’t change the FSF’s mind at all. OpenBSD still uses the “and” wording.

XiZhao 13y ago
Tldrlegal creator here. Good points, your depth of understanding on this license has really illuminated on how lacking or misleading the current summary can be. Do you think you can suggest some alternative working using the edit button on the site? I will merge your changes in ASAP.

swatkat 13y ago

Check out EULAlyzer as well: https://www.brightfort.com/eulalyzer.html https://www.brightfort.com/eulalyzer.html

JoshTriplett 13y ago

This seems quite nice. Two things I'd love to see, which would make it even more handy: - I'd love to see each license that has a standard SPDX identifier (https://spdx.org/licenses/ https://spdx.org/licenses/) include that identifier as metadata in its tldrlegal record. (And ideally tldrlegal.com should have a standard URL to reach the one-and-only license corresponding to a given SPDX identifier.) - I'd love to see standardized tags for OSI-compliant Open Source licenses, GNU-approved Free Software licenses, GPLv2-compatible licenses, and GPLv3-compatible licenses. (For the latter two, it'd be interesting to have a generalized tagging mechanism for saying "compatible with (other license record)", but in practice those are the two cases that matter most, and too much generality might not be a good thing.) Also, this site seems to be doing something with icon fonts that doesn't work: I see missing-character glyphs for characters F098 and F099 where Facebook and Twitter icons should appear, and an "fl" ligature where a search button should appear. (Firefox 27 on Linux, in case that matters.) I also don't see the placeholders on the username, email, and password fields in the form that pops up when clicking the "Sign Up" link; the placeholders in the form on the front page do appear. (Consider using real labels rather than placeholders for forms like that, to make them more accessible.)

Argorak 13y ago
The Firefox issue is a classic indicator that the site would work in Firefox with one additional step and the creators didn't bother checking. In this case: Firefox expects CORS to load fonts from a different domain, e.g. CloudFront. https://coderwall.com/p/ub8zug https://coderwall.com/p/ub8zug The other classic is that Firefox expects fonts to be served with the correct mine-type.
- XiZhao 13y ago
  Thanks Argorak, that was just inexcusable laziness from my side -- thanks for bringing it up.
  - Argorak 13y ago
    Also not meant as an offense ;). Its just so telling... Thanks for taking note.

notastartup 13y ago

what is the best license where you maintain the brand name of the open source software, and allow end user to modify it according to their needs but not release it under a different brand name OR use it to run commercial services off the software (that will require commercial license) ?

icebraining 13y ago
Do you really want people releasing code under your brand? In any case, a license with such restrictions is considered non-free, so you won't find them on the OSI or FSF. There's CC-BY-NC, but they don't recommend applying it to software. I don't know if there's any other freely usable license with such terms, you may need to pay a lawyer to write you one. Or you could ask, say, the MAME developers if they license you theirs: http://mamedev.org/legal.html http://mamedev.org/legal.html

sushijain 13y ago

Very useful.

mlubin 13y ago

Very cool. Missing LGPL v3. I've been looking for a clear explanation of how it differs from LGPL v2.1.

XiZhao 13y ago
Feel free to submit it to the site using the link on the top right!

XiZhao 13y ago

Hey guys, tldrlegal creator here. Just a quick note -- I am really glad to see discussions about license interpretations here, this is exactly what I hoped for when I first started the project. As a reminder on tldrlegal you can give feedback using the black tab on the right and also suggest a change to any license page by editing it when you're signed in! My biggest goal is to make sure content on tldr is of the highest quality and I'm really grateful that you guys are taking the time to critique and raise questions about the ways things have been summarized. Many of the summaries are outdated, and the best way for you guys to get your thoughts integrated is to use the editing features on the site! Tldr - you can edit license content on the site!

clarry 13y ago

Are there any actual lawyers behind this project? Or is it yet another site where every other guy from the Internet who thinks he knows what some license means decides to tell everyone else about it?

masklinn 13y ago
> Or is it yet another site where every other guy from the Internet who thinks he knows what some license means decides to tell everyone else about it? Anybody can edit the license summary and attributes, so it's literally "every other guy from the internet"
- PhantomGremlin 13y ago
  So it's a lot like the following comment which I grabbed from somewhere on the Interweb: "Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information." - Michael Scott
- clarry 13y ago
  Well I didn't try that, but other comments here say that you may suggest changes which then must be approved by a manager. But even if anyone could post and edit content without any approval process, the content could still be heavily moderated after the fact. So my question still stands.

aleem 13y ago

Could you keep the badges expanded instead of on hover? It would make for easier comparison.

NAFV_P 13y ago

Software licences for dummies - hell, I'm mostly clueless about this so I had a good look. One point I will make is that as soon as you read the relevant material on this site, you have to go into a dark corner and read the small print. I've noticed the odd comment or two on this page mentioning lawyers. A bit expensive, but they're the most qualified people to talk to, bar (sorry, bad pun) judges. At college, I used to live with someone training to be a barrister. Whereas the average thickness of my maths and science texts is, say 500 pages, I saw one book on law hitting around 2,500 pages. It ranks alongside the London Knowledge for verbosity.

ExpiredLink 13y ago

Maybe I'm the only one but I don't find this overview convincing.

delinka 13y ago

"GPL v3 tries to close some loopholes in GPL v2." And what, in plain English, would those loopholes be?

belorn 13y ago
GPLv2 says: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.". GPLv3 explicit says: "not allow patents to restrict development and use of software" GPLv3 also say that you can not use hardware restrictions as a trick to circumventing the no-further-restrictions legal requirement. One could argue that GPLv2 already include everything GPLv3 do in form of that single line. Doing such interpretation would for all practical purposes upgrade every gplv2-only project to the same conditions as of GPLv3 (but with fewer license compatibilities). The FSF clearly decided not to go that route, and created the GPLv3.
chimeracoder 13y ago
The GPLv3 served two main purposes: 1) Prevent Tivoization[0]. As noted below, it could be argued that the GPLv2 already forbade this, but that is left up to legal interpretation (which did not always agree in practice). So they made this explicit in the GPLv3. 2) Allow interoperability between the different "flavors" of the GPL. The GPL comes in three "flavors" - regular, lesser, and Affero. Under v2, projects using the regular GPL could not be combined with projects using the Affero GPL. Under v3, all three of these can be safely mixed. (Essentially, for v3, each of the "flavors" includes an explicit exception for the other two, if I remember correctly). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization

wreegab 13y ago

As a software developer, I want people to use my stuff. Once over the hurdle of writing something that people might find useful, I have to choose a license. When it's a library, I usually choose something without much restrictions, like MIT or Apache v2, or else developer will just go look elsewhere. However there is a project which is a full blown application, and I went GPLv3, because I want anybody to be able to use it, or fork it. However it would bother me if someone was using this project to earn money, as I personally forfeited deriving any income from this project (not even donations). Apparently GPLv3 allows commercial use (I didn't realize that when I picked the license). What license would best match my concerns?

lambda 13y ago
There are no common open source licenses which forbid commercial use, as that is against the various different guidelines for what constitutes open source or free software (the Free Software Foundation Free Software definition: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html, the Debian Free Software Guidelines: https://www.debian.org/social_contract https://www.debian.org/social_contract, or the Open Source Definition: http://opensource.org/osd-annotated http://opensource.org/osd-annotated). Probably the closest you can get in the form of commonly recognized license that meets those criteria is the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. It was designed for creative works (books, movies, music, and so on) rather than software, so it doesn't address some technicalities that come up in the software field, but it is a license which allows modification and redistribution but not commercial use. However, you have to ask yourself, why do you want to do this? Are you planning on selling the software commercially yourself? If someone else happens to make some money by adding features to your software and releasing them back to the community for anyone to use (which they are required to do under the terms of the GPL), does that actually hurt you? Or if they don't change it and just sell it straight, why would anyone buy that over the free version? Why did you voluntarily forfeit making any money, even donations? Would you accept donations if offered? How about accept a contract to add a particular feature? If you won't accept that, why would you want someone else not to be able to accept such an offer to add a given feature? If your users are willing to pay for development, but you don't want to accept the money, should someone else not be able to accept the money, put the work in, and release their changes under the same license? I would recommend sticking to the GPLv3. Most of the kinds of commercial use that are actually objectionable, like adding proprietary features and selling that version at a premium, are not possible under the GPLv3.

wes-exp 13y ago

I hate to be a party pooper, but I think this site is completely naïve from a legal perspective, and actually harmful. There are many ambiguities not covered by simple bullet point descriptions. Ask yourself, why are licenses long in the first place? I defer to the IT / Digital Legal Companion, by Gene K. Landy, an actual lawyer: "The Myth of the Two-Page Contract ... Many times a client has brought us a complex multiyear distribution deal and wanted a 'simple two-page agreement.' Sometimes, they even ask for a one-page deal! The ostensible goal is to cut down negotiation time. But for most negotiated deals, it is a myth that adequate contracts can be short in this way. If the lawyer tries to comply (and we have tried), the result will almost always be to make the deal ambiguous. ... Managing complex deals full of contingencies with as imprecise a tool as the English language is tough enough; it is not prudent to try (or force your lawyer to try) to make agreements more risky than they have to be." The sentiment could not be more clear: all that legalese is in the agreement for a reason. "Simplifying" licenses into bullet points does not adequately capture their content, and it is a huge UI fail to make people think that it does. Let's start with the site's treatment of GPLv3. You get a few bullet point labels about e.g. source code disclosure plus a three-sentence summary. "GPL v3 tries to close some loopholes in GPL v2." Oh, really, what are those loopholes? No discussion of code signing, patent rights, affero vs. non-affero, among many other issues. Even the bullet points themselves do not adequately capture nuance. That the GPLv3 allows commercial use is technically true, hence the label "commercial use". However, what isn't mentioned is the fact that the GPLv3 separately prohibits practically every known business model for profiting from software. These ambiguities are not minor issues; they are fundamental. Let's not wrongly give people the idea that complex licenses can be summed up with a few bullet points, any more than our technical work can be summed up with a few crappy analogies!

clarry 13y ago
I agree that oversimplifying is a problem and the devil is in the details. Having said that, I believe it's possible to present licenses in an easier-to-digest way by hilighting specifics and providing examples of real-world implications that different clauses carry with them, providing perspective from multiple different view points. There are many ways to do this, but one method would be to present the visitor with questions about what he intends to do (or intends to let others do) with code covered by a given license, and proceed to point out the relevant restrictions and obligations in that case. For example, do you intend to redistribute the work? In case of the 2-clause BSD license, this should hilight the fact that for binary distribution, you are obliged to include the license in documentation and/or other materials; and perhaps give examples of cases where this might be a problematic requirement. For GPLv2, it would have to go into detail about having to provide the source or a written offer (and then make sure you have the source around for three years!), etc. None of this is substitute for actually reading the license texet, but this sort of a resource could really help people understand points they glossed over, forgot, or somehow misunderstood, or whose implications (negative or positive) they did not realize. Add cross-references and people could really check their undestanding of the license text they've read. Actually, I was hoping this would be exactly that resource, and that is why I asked in another comment about whether there's any legal backing behind this project. Because if somebody is going to write an elaborate guide to some license, it'd better be good, and not based on common misconceptions.

bib971 13y ago

This is even a shorter tl;dr: use MIT or Apache. Who would choose other licenses, more complicated, if they didn't mean to screw you later.

clarry 13y ago
You could shorten that tl;dr by removing mention of the Apache license. Which is much longer and more complicated than the MIT license, and incompatible with GPLv2 (at least according to the FSF).
- XiZhao 13y ago
  Yeah but Apache gives you an explicit grant to patent rights whereas MIT, although doesn't explicitly restrict it, doesn't grant it either.

gkya 13y ago

Now, I just glanced at the thing, and the very first thing that annoys me is this: Why would you require an account for submissions? Or rather, why would you need to have any kind of user accounts mechanism at this site? The second problem is that the combination of TLDR and legal. One should at least bother to skim through the license of a program they'll use. BSD/MIT are about 20 lines, and GPL3 is about 700 lines: % find /usr/share/licenses/common/ -name '*.txt' | xargs wc -l 470 /usr/share/licenses/common/MPL/license.txt 193 /usr/share/licenses/common/PSF/license.txt 151 /usr/share/licenses/common/PerlArtistic/license.txt 165 /usr/share/licenses/common/LGPL3/license.txt 88 /usr/share/licenses/common/EPL/license.txt 377 /usr/share/licenses/common/CDDL/license.txt 76 /usr/share/licenses/common/W3C/license.txt 68 /usr/share/licenses/common/PHP/license.txt 201 /usr/share/licenses/common/Artistic2.0/license.txt 661 /usr/share/licenses/common/AGPL3/license.txt 339 /usr/share/licenses/common/GPL2/license.txt 55 /usr/share/licenses/common/RUBY/license.txt 63 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-sa-3.0.txt 61 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-nc-3.0.txt 12 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-readme.txt 58 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-nc-nd-3.0.txt 60 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-3.0.txt 63 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-nc-sa-3.0.txt 57 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-nd-3.0.txt 502 /usr/share/licenses/common/LGPL2.1/license.txt 202 /usr/share/licenses/common/Apache/license.txt 217 /usr/share/licenses/common/CPL/license.txt 397 /usr/share/licenses/common/FDL1.2/license.txt 416 /usr/share/licenses/common/LPPL/license.txt 674 /usr/share/licenses/common/GPL3/license.txt 54 /usr/share/licenses/common/ZPL/license.txt 451 /usr/share/licenses/common/FDL1.3/license.txt 6131 total One need not be a lawyer to understand what this website offers with merely reading one of these. Also, there are Wikipedia articles for most the licenses, and OSI website is quite informative. This website is unnecessary.

clarry 13y ago
The uncountable flames on Web forums, the GPL FAQ, all the questions on the FSF IRC channel and so on are IMHO enough proof that licensing is complicated and people have trouble reading and understanding licenses. Correct & well laid out information about them is hard enough to find. I think a new website could help with that. It could also guide people in choosing a license for their code. Having said that, in its current state tldrlegal isn't much help.

kyberias 13y ago

Aargh! Fix that horrible "jumping of links when I try to click them" behaviour of the page.

owl_icecream 13y ago

This reminds me of - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJuXIq7OazQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJuXIq7OazQ "There is not one section... it's just the vibe of the thing" "I'm afraid Mr Denuto, you'll have to be more specific"

quadrangle 13y ago

It's totally stupid that this is not itself Open Source. Otherwise, it's got potential and probably is better than GitHub's choosealicense thing

XiZhao 13y ago
TLDR is actually older than choosealicense
- quadrangle 13y ago
  Actually, I knew that, but I'd forgotten about it until now. My point still stands that it is otherwise better (it would be if it were Free/Libre/Open itself)

freudien 13y ago

Social media connect under "Follow tldr" is broken for me (Chrome 33 on OSX). Also, use "e.g." not "i.e." -- while similar, the contextually mean different things. The former is "for example", the latter is "for instance." Really gave me doubts to the integrity of the website if such a simple grammar mistake was made on the front page, in the call-to-action. Food for thought.

blueskin_ 13y ago

Seems to be missing a few, e.g. Apache 1.1.