[linux-elitists] Fwd: RFC: Freecell Solver Licence "Change"

[Don Marti]

begin Rick Moen quotation of Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 01:56:43AM -0700:

> Anyhow, among the points my (referenced) page makes in passing is that 
> a simple one-line permissive licence avoids ambiguity entirely, a
> two line licence permits warranty disclaimer, and three lines permits
> using a standard, OSI-certified licence:  the Fair License.

Why not stick with something that's already in
/usr/share/common-licenses, and that people already
know, unless there's a really compelling reason to
do otherwise?

  "First, we want to establish the idea that a
  computer language is not just a way of getting a
  computer to perform operations but rather that it
  is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about
  methodology. Thus, programs must be written for
  people to read, and only incidentally for machines
  to execute."

        -- Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman 
           with Julie Sussman,
           Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

You wouldn't write your own string comparison function
in C just so that you could return true if two strings
matched.  Other C programmers are already used to
seeing !strncmp.  Likewise, why waste a potential
user's or reader's time, time that could have gone
into actually learning the software, with an excursion
into the law library of license weeniedom, just to get
the same effect as a license that people already know?

-- 
Don Marti                                 +1 510-332-1587 mobile
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org
See you at OpenSource World: August 11-13, 2009 in San Francisco