<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On Mar 5, 2009, at 12:19 PM, graham wrote:</div><blockquote type="cite"><div>I think it would be <br>extremely helpful if the licenses themselves included an explanation for <br>non-lawyers, in the way the gpl always did.<br></div></blockquote><br></div><div>Not always a good idea. If your license has any ambiguities, then a judge will go outside your license to see if you've said anything else about the meaning of the license. Potentially, anything you say about the license could become part of the license. So your non-legal explanation actually may have legal import.</div><div><br></div><div>In principle, you're suggesting that code should be explained in the comments, when actually, comments should explain things that *aren't* in the code. If you want to know what the code says, you should be reading the code, not the comments. If you want to know what a legal agreement says, you should read it. It's tedious, yes, but I've read every one of the OSI approved Open Source licenses at least twice, and I lived through it. if you call this living, of course. I could be a zombie, and how would you know??</div><br><div apple-content-edited="true"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>--<br>Russ Nelson - <a href="http://community.cloudmade.com/blog">http://community.cloudmade.com/blog</a> - <a href="http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson">http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson</a><br><a href="mailto:russ@cloudmade.com">russ@cloudmade.com</a> - <a href="http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson">http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson</a></div></div></span> </div><br></body></html>