[sword-devel] Notice in licence agreement

Jonathan Morgan jonmmorgan at gmail.com
Sat Apr 25 01:19:14 MST 2009


On 4/24/09, Eeli Kaikkonen <eekaikko at mail.student.oulu.fi> wrote:
> Quoting DM Smith <dmsmith at crosswire.org>:
>
> > I like your suggestion. Give that CC are legal licenses, it appears
> > that this summary is complete, perhaps drafted by lawyers :0
> >
>
> The problem with it is that it's too long. I don't want to give a legally
> correct statement, only a short and easily understandable statement which
> every user would find easy to read and understand. The point is to tell
> shortly what they can do: obtain and use it freely for almost any purpose.
> AND that distributing is allowed within certain limits. My clause about
> distributing is too limited as was pointed out. However, it's not legally
> binding and it still tells people that they can distribute.
>
> The real problem with ANY licence is that people don't read them. Therefore
> I want to give something easy and short, maybe in bold font, so that even
> some users would understand what the licence is about.
>
> Anyways, even if we forget the exact wording, the other point was even more
> important. Would the frontend developers like to use this kind of statement,
> crafted carefully, in all frontends? We don't know yet how our apps will be
> received in a long run in the Windows world. Probably they will be taken by
> the evil people and sold for big money without source code. If this kind of
> statement is in the Windows installer it would spread the knowledge amongst
> users.

I'm afraid I wouldn't be convinced that such people are evil.  Assume
they are ill-informed unless assured otherwise - it's safer.

However, if they can't even be bothered to write a new installer that
takes out the license statement and are really intending to make lots
of money out of it I don't think we have too much to fear.

And yes, I do know of all the trouble BibleCS had some years back.

Jon



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