Comment by jashkenas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jashkenas | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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