Free?

[Don]

On 23.10.2011 20:27, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Sunday, October 23, 2011 14:26:34 Don wrote:
>> On 23.10.2011 00:28, Sean Kelly wrote:
>>> It's annoying as it means a pass through the documentation team for
>>> distributed software, but whatever.  At least it's usable. Personally,
>>> my favorite is the Boost license, and I'm just about to the point where
>>> I don't even care about source code attribution for my own work.
>>
>> Yes. I don't see why it's necessary at all. To take somebody's code and
>> pretend that you wrote it, is plagiarism. You don't need a license to
>> tell you that.
>
> But you probably do need a license in order to protect it in court.

Maybe, but if it goes to court, you also need money!
OTOH, though, with so much code in publically accessible repositories, I 
think it should be pretty easy to identify blatant stealing.

My feeling is, that often licenses are put on code just because the 
author wants acknowledgement. Nothing more. It's pretty common to read:
"Do whatever you like with this, just keep my name on it".
Which *should* be covered by plagiarism anyway. Thus, the only reason 
for most licenses should be for the benefit of the user, not the author.

But most of the licenses include all kinds of silly extra restrictions, 
possibly relevant for corporations but not for people who've just 
written some stuff in their spare time.

> If people
> were going to just pay attention to right and wrong with this sort of thing, a
> lot of licenses would never have been needed in the first place (some like the
> GPL might still need to exist to insist that you give back rather than simply
> not claiming that you wrote it, but many of the OSS licensing center around
> making sure that you don't claim that you wrote something that you didn't).
> Still, it's pretty sad when you think about it.

The GPL makes a lot of sense to me. It has a particular agenda, and it's 
trying to force users in a particular direction.
But the hundreds of variations of BSD licenses seem completely 
unnecessary to me.

> One nice use for the names attributions though - completely beyond the legal
> ramifications - is that it makes it easier to know who wrote something so that
> you can contact them if you need to (though since it doesn't include contact
> information beyond the name, that only gets you so far).