A Digression about Well-Written Licenses

A Digression about Well-Written Licenses

The first open source licenses, the BSD and GPL, were written almost fifteen years ago. That was the time of UNIX. We used slow-speed modem data connections back then, before the high-speed Internet was available worldwide. Personal computers were much more primitive beasts.

Just as these fifteen years have witnessed improvements in software, so too have they produced improvements to software licenses. Attorneys are no longer struggling with unknown concepts when dealing with open source, and so, as the licenses described in this book demonstrate , competent attorneys are writing very good open source licenses.

The CPL is a very good one because it precisely describes a reasonable reciprocal bargain that promotes free software . It has seven brief sections ( totaling only nine pages in the Appendices to this book) in which it defines terms, grants the appropriate licenses, states the reciprocity obligations, and then deals with the commercial and legal realities of:

...The laws of the State of New York and the intellectual property laws of the United States of America. ( CPL section 7.)

The CPL is fully compatible with the Free Software Guidelines, the Open Source Definition, and the Open Source Principles listed in Chapter 1.

Although this license may not be appropriate for everyone (see Chapter 10) it exemplifies the important qualities of a well-written open source license. Notice that important words are not used in the CPL without a definition (with two interesting exceptions). Notice that the CPL can be used as a template between any Contributor and any Recipient . Notice that the words shall and must and may not always mean something mandatory, and the word may is always permissive.

Some amateurs believe they can write open source licenses. They should first read a good license like the CPL and ask themselves if they can do as well.