When Amateurs Write Licenses
The same programmers who cringe when a lawyer attempts to write high-quality software feel no qualms about writing their own open source licenses. Their goal, it appears, is to craft something that sounds like a license, to define a form of software freedom with reasonable terms and conditions, and then wait for the community to adopt the license and distribute software under it. This technique sometimes works. Some members of the open source community are more concerned with making a philosophical statement, getting free software distributed to the world, and letting license enforcement take care of itself somehow in the future. That can be a commendable goal, but from a lawyer's perspective, it is amateurish and ...
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