Comment by jashkenas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jashkenas | Hacker News Reader

Friends, I totally get the initial instinct to think "Aieeee! Not another amateur open source software license! Those things breed like flies!"

But if you wouldn't mind taking two minutes to read the text of the license before giving in to that feeling — I think you'll find that it might put you more at ease than what you're currently using — if you're using MIT.

Like MIT and ISC, it's short and sweet and comprehensible, and like Apache it tries to establish common standards around potential patent use and contributions back to the codebase. It hits a sweet spot that, for me, doesn't exist in anything currently on the OSI's long list of licenses.

I did run it by a couple of lawyers and a couple of open source developers before publishing it this morning. But I don't believe that review should matter too much to you: An OSS license is an agreement between the author and the user of the software. If they can both easily understand it to mean the same thing, then we can feel that we're on solid ground. That's why we use MIT today.

Unfortunately, I've been conditioned by the scary stories 'DannyBee tells here to worry about new license language that doesn't come directly from lawyers.

It sounds like you've actually had lawyers look at it. A blurb anywhere on this page indicating that it's been vetted this would be pretty powerful!

It may be pretty powerful, but I'm uncomfortable believing that it really should be. For starters, every lawyer has a different opinion, a different style of preferred phrasing, and a different understanding of what open source software is. Ultimately the parties involved are you, your users and your contributors. Most of us don't have lawyers.

That said, I think it might be effective to put some short legal opinions, from experts in this particular field, into the FAQ. If anyone's listening: that would make for a great pull request.

The goal here is to make this thing as shipshape, watertight and bulletproof as possible, while remaining "simpler than MIT". Then it becomes the license I would have always wanted to use.

They are experts, we are not.

Here's a scenario: you're an IT guy, not much of a programmer. You need to do some weird data processing on 10,000 MBOX archives and you can't mess it up because there's important corporate data in there, although if you did mess up nobody would probably notice for 5 years. Just because programmers disagree on software architecture doesn't mean you shouldn't have a programmer look at your code before you try to run that Perl script.

I see your concern. I think one qualified lawyer would put this issue to bed. Surely there's one we can just pay a couple hundred to to scan it?

This license sure looks great. It probably is! It would be neat if we could just know that.

It's a cool thing to publish either way. :)

Let's do it. I think it's mostly a matter of picking not just a qualified lawyer, but one of the best possible lawyers for the job: ideally, someone well known who has dealt with OSS licenses and lawsuits in the past.

I've opened a ticket for it: https://github.com/jashkenas/lil-license/issues/3

'DannyBee, I blame you for this, so do you have any recommendations?

Jeremy, not that you need the help, but I think this is really neat and if you want to pass the hat around to pay for something formal I'm happy to chip in.

It's a noble goal, some thoughts on the license.

I really wish it made clear that the license was irrevocable. I think the understanding in the community is that once you give permission for software to be used under a license you shouldn't go back on that, but other licenses, like Apache, make that clear.

The phrase "Any modification to the software submitted to the authors may be incorporated into the software under the terms of this license." could be worded better. I think Apache nails this, "Unless You explicitly state otherwise, any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of this License, without any additional terms or conditions". This gives some wiggle room for submissions under different license, if they are explicitly called out.

Thanks for the thoughts. I considered those two issues in the drafting — revocability, and contributor submission licensing — but they can certainly be discussed further.

Do you mind opening a ticket on the Github repo to discuss them? (If you don't have time, I might do it.)

Yeah no problem

If it's a simple permissive license with patent grant, what's the advantage over BSD-2-Clause-Patent (https://opensource.org/licenses/BSDplusPatent) ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com