On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 21:46:21 +1100, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
- My user is concerned that a large number of having a large number of individual licenses even though textually identical modulo author, date, etc would mean a big hassle getting their lawyers and their user's lawyers to sign off on each and every license
Why do their lawyers all need to sign off individually for BSD licenses (which if memory serves all platform libraries have to be licensed under, or some variant thereof)? At most it just means they need to lump them all into one big text file somewhere saying which libraries they used... (then again, IANAL, and don't charge by the hour to consider these complex technical questions :p).
I find the whole thing baffling myself. I'd thought this would be the sensible thing to do, but I guess when it comes to these licensing things it's not the actual pain that counts, but the perceived potential pain. Know what I mean? It's similar to the "won't touch with a 10ft pole" attitude to the GPL that some entities may take. It's basically a precautionary "la la la; I can't hear you" or a conservative stance which consists of "I don't understand this stuff, so I'm going to do the thing that seems safest to me", which may or may not be a reasonable reaction...
Well, it would need copyright attribution/agreement of everyone that's ever committed code to any library/application to the Platform (which is why so many large projects want it) to re-license them AFAIK, which may be difficult.
I could just say it'd be unrealistic. Just trying to be thorough. -- Eric Kow http://erickow.com