Posts Tagged ‘license’
February 12th, 2012
If we must read all the EULAs we agree upon we would not have time for work. Nor free time.
TL;DR
The computer I am writing on right now has been in my custody for about a year and a half. During this time I have collected every EULA I needed to agree upon. It adds up to 192 EULAs. Many are most certainly similar, like GPL, and others are probably variants of themselves.
I stored the agreements in RTF format except for Flash that is in PDF and a IE9 update that it seems I had to track down on the web and download the HTML page with PNGs and all. It all ends up at slightly more than 62 megs.
Now these 62 megs of data stored mostly in RTF aren’t 62 millions of readable characters so I took a 72k rtf document and saved as text. 66k. That is roughly 10% overhead. So I guess out of 62 megs I have about 57 megs of characters.
192 files. 57 million characters. With about 5 letters in an english word this would be slightly more than 11 million words. If a page has 250 words this would be 45500 pages. By comparision the whole Harry Potters series is about 3400 pages. Encyclopædia Britannica is 40 million words.
To be honest: one can’t compare word count between a book and an EULA since the former is written in English while the latter in Legalece.
August 19th, 2010
There are some hundred open source licenses to choose from and tons of documentation to dig through. Noone is able to grok that so help and guidance is welcome.
An LdBrouwer has written a quite short comparison. It doesn’t give you the full monty but points you in the right direction and above all – gives the noob and non-tech some basic knowledge and directions to steer by.
He also links to another site with some Yes/No questions to find out which license fits you. It doesn’t hold very many licenses and is a tad old but nevertheless worth a try.
Somewhere there is (was) a site. I saw it some years ago. It is also a simple expert system for choosing the right F/OSS license. But I can’t find it.
Update: Another article is here.
February 20th, 2009
At the time of wrintig there are like 78 open source licenses to choose from. The original creator of the open source license idea has an argument that 3 or 4 should do.
So if you ever think of choosing a license for you work the linke below might a good place to start.
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/3803101/Bruce-Perens-How-Many-Open-Source-Licenses-Do-You-Need.htm
Update: A similar article is here.
November 1st, 2008
When you have decided that open sourcing your code would be a good idea the next question follows; which license?
Claes Mogren wrote a short and good description about some licenses and the thoughts behind them: http://informationhunger.blogspot.com/2008/10/open-source-license-primer.html
Update other articles are here and here.