13. Miscellaneous

Both OSL and AFL

This License represents the complete agreement concerning the subject matter hereof. If any provision of this License is held to be unenforceable, such provision shall be reformed only to the extent necessary to make it enforceable.

These provisions are common in professionally written licenses.

The first sentence avoids the confusion that can result when people say different things about a license than what the license itself says. I described one such situation in Chapter 6, where Linus Torvalds has written publicly that his interpretation of the GPL is different than that of the license's authors at the Free Software Foundation. The OSL/AFL handles such situations by saying that the words of the license prevail over extraneous statements by either party.

The second sentence may help to convince courts not to be too drastic in reforming the license when the license is found to be improper under some law. Judges are discouraged from radically reforming the license.

Comparison to Other Licenses

All the major reciprocal licenses in this book contain miscellaneous provisions. I leave those as an exercise for the reader.