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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 ne

by 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.
XiZhao 13y ago
4 reasons: 1. It's hard work summarizing licenses. I'd like to give people a chance to get credited for their contributions to the community and be social about licenses. 2. A little harder to make bold/troll edits if all of them are moderated by both license submitters and admins on the site. Any information around legal things are very sensitive and impactful - although TLDR doesn't claim to be a law firm or provide legal advice, we still try our best to have good quality content. 3. Future ability to build tools for the community on this dataset, where data is attached to user accounts. 4. Easier way to understand how many people are participating and announce new, important features. Finally, TLDR doesn't encourage you to ignore the license. It provides you an out before you delve in deep.

by gkya 13y ago

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.

XiZhao 13y ago

4 reasons: 1. It's hard work summarizing licenses. I'd like to give people a chance to get credited for their contributions to the community and be social about licenses. 2. A little harder to make bold/troll edits if all of them are moderated by both license submitters and admins on the site. Any information around legal things are very sensitive and impactful - although TLDR doesn't claim to be a law firm or provide legal advice, we still try our best to have good quality content. 3. Future ability to build tools for the community on this dataset, where data is attached to user accounts. 4. Easier way to understand how many people are participating and announce new, important features. Finally, TLDR doesn't encourage you to ignore the license. It provides you an out before you delve in deep.