The Most Sensible License Agreement I’ve Seen in a Few Years
From Delicious Library 1.6.4:
LICENSE AGREEMENT
DELICIOUS LIBRARY IS PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES THAT THE PROGRAM IS FREE OF DEFECTS, MERCHANTABLE, OR FIT FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
which means… don’t sue us if something goes wrong!
Believe it or not, that’s it. Would that most payware licenses were this simple and obvious.
May 29th, 2007 at 1:20 PM
Umm, what are you allowed to do with the library? Copy it onto your computer? Copy it onto other people’s computers? Incorporate it in your own programs? Or just take the CD, fold it till it’s all corners, and stick it where the sun don’t shine?
This may be the only part called the license, but the effective license must be somewhere else.
May 29th, 2007 at 2:31 PM
It’s a common misconception that you need a big page of legalese to tell you what you can and can’t do with software. That’s false. You don’t need a license for software anymore than you need a license for a book. They sold me a piece of software. I can do anything I like with it that is not actively contradictory to the laws of the country in which I reside.
One version of Prince of Persia actually had an even simpler license that basically said, “There is no license. Follow copyright law.”
Remember, most software licenses (including this one) are designed to take away rights you might otherwise have under Federal and state law. Even free-software licenses such as the GPL take away some rights, though they grant others you would not otherwise have.
May 30th, 2007 at 10:22 PM
I think that there is confusion here about what Delicious Library actually is. I originally assumed (as I suspect did John) that Delicious Library is actually a re-usable software library. In that case, the lack of any sort of distribution permission in the license would be a problem.
May 31st, 2007 at 3:35 AM
Um, what rights does GPL (version?) take away? My, possibly outdated, understanding was that it was based on copyright law and actually granted extra rights.
May 31st, 2007 at 4:08 AM
The GPL does grant extra rights, but it does take away your rights to a warranty of fitness for a particular purpose, and your rights to sue for damages in some jurisdictions if the software misbehaves. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing, but it is a removal of rights you might otherwise have.
On the other hand, you don’t have to accept the GPL to merely use GPL software, so possibly the rights removal only kicks in if you redistribute the software.
June 2nd, 2007 at 4:19 PM
One of the most sensible and most permissive licenses is the ISC licence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license
http://9fans.net/archive/2003/06/277
June 18th, 2007 at 9:33 AM
If the software was sold (I now understand that it’s not a software library), then your arguments are plausible. However, I have never bought a piece of software in my life. I have copied software (libre or otherwise) without charge on many occasions, and on a few occasions I have bought licenses to use software under circumstances that made it extremely clear that I was not buying the software. I don’t think there’s much software available for actual sale.