Masahiro Nakagawa and SHOO invited to join Phobos developers

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Don" <nospam at nospam.com> wrote in message 
news:hrcpir$ob3$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> "Don" <nospam at nospam.com> wrote in message 
>> news:hrclc9$gjg$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I *hate* licenses...(That's why I use the zlib one, none of the public 
>>>> domain problems, all of the freedoms that I've been told Boost offers, 
>>>> and none of Boost's idiotic over-verbosity.)
>>> Yeah, we all feel the same way.
>>> But I don't think the boost license is verbose. It's 4% of the length of 
>>> the GPL:
>>>
>>> zlib:     957 characters
>>> boost:    1361 (1/3 of which comes from US legal requirements).
>>> Apache2:                 9219
>>> Academic free license3: 10332
>>> GPL 3:                  32069
>>
>> Saying a license isn't verbose because it's much shorter than the GPL is 
>> like saying a particular restaurant is good just because it's better than 
>> eating out of a dumpster.
>
> Well, there's not many places to eat in this town, outside of the 
> dumpsters. Boost and zlib were the only ones I found.
>

Hee hee :)

>> Seriously, were they *trying* to prevent people from understanding it? 
>> If
>> so, I don't think they could have done a better job. (At least not 
>> without hiring the FSF's "Let's do everything we can to enure our 
>> profession is needed as much as possible" lawyers.)
>
> Have you read the rationale statement for the Boost license? (on the boost 
> website).
>

I have, but I just read through it again to make sure I didn't miss 
anything.

The only part of my complaint that it seems to address is the all-caps 
section. But even with that, all it actually says is "Capitalization of 
these particular provisions is a US legal mandate for consumer protection. 
(Diane Cabell)" and provides no source and no further details about the 
mandate. (BTW, Figures that the US gov would require consumer-protection 
text to be in a form that's well known to be difficult to read, and then try 
to pretend that doing so is somehow in the consumer's best interest instead 
of corporate best interest.)

I did find this bit interesting though:
"Do I have to copyright/license trivial files? Even a test file that just 
contains an empty main() should have a copyright. Files without copyrights 
make corporate lawyers nervous, and that's a barrier to adoption."

Going by what's said there, I think I actually *like* that. And by that I 
mean, using one blanket license file for the whole source and not being 
explicit in every individual file. As much as I dislike about the GPL, I've 
actually always been somewhat conflicted about it. I hate the verbosity, 
viral nature, inhibits adoption, inability to make much use of GPLed stuff 
when I've been working in a real commercial environment, etc. But, I love 
that it prevents the aiding of proprietary corporate crap. If some big 
corporation is going to try to push some closed-off crap (like Apple's 
iP*'s, cell phones, just about any game console, and software that I need to 
be able to rely on even if the company goes down or chooses to drop 
support), then I *want* them to be forced to re-invent everything (which 
they'll inevitably do poorly) to help keep the door open for a better, less 
anti-consumer, competitor. So if there's something that's only flaw is that 
it makes corporate lawyers nervous, I'd say that sounds like a step closer 
to having the best of both worlds: keeping proprietary corporate crap out of 
the loop *without* actually being viral.

> The really appalling one is the OSI license. There's a huge document which 
> purports to explain the license, but it doesn't explain it at all. It's 
> just a polemic against the GPL. The FSF is much clearer than the OSI.

Good to know. I wasn't really familiar with that one.

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