Deprecation Notice: MIT and BSD licenses

Re:Deprecation Notice: MIT and BSD licenses by beefhash on Saturday March 09, 2019 @03:06PM (#19348163)

I feel that Kyle E. Mitchell places an immense focus on the U.S. and neglects the situation in other countries to a certain degree. His MIT license explanation was fairly U.S.-centric, citing primarily U.S. sources (e.g. referring to the UCC, books published by U.S. publishers) and kept going on about the debate about contracts and licenses, which probably does not ravage quite that hard in Europe -- while the patent aspect can effectively be ignored over there because software patents don't exist.

I get it, Silicon Valley is important. But there's other places, too. I don't feel like they have been given enough attention in this new license.

Meanwhile, the Blue Oak license leaves unadressed the problem of European moral rights in copyright[1]. Similarly, the issue of someone simply not reading the terms and just taking the code, similar to EULAs, is left unexplained. The Blue Oak license assumes acceptance and agreement, which may not actually hold up in court and lead to a different result.

[1] cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors%27_rights for an introduction

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Re:Deprecation Notice: MIT and BSD licenses by kemitchell on Saturday March 09, 2019 @11:51PM (#19350358)

I place an immense focus on US law. It's the only law I'm qualified to practice.

We were able to incorporate indirect feedback from very competent UK counsel. Not as much as I'd like. For example, the inclusion of "condition" in No Liability makes no sense under US law, but reflects a technical distinction in some UK jurisdictions.

I'd like to draw in more input from counsel elsewhere, which is part of the reason we published versioned 1.0.0 from the get-go.

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Re:Deprecation Notice: MIT and BSD licenses by chrisseaton on Saturday March 09, 2019 @03:09PM (#19348180)

Does he have professional expertise in law outside of the US?

I think lawyers generally don't comment in their professional capacity on things they aren't experts on. Engineers could learn to do the same!

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Re:Deprecation Notice: MIT and BSD licenses by yxhuvud on Saturday March 09, 2019 @03:19PM (#19348232)

He may not but claims they were more than one lawyer involved in drafting it.

Perhaps they should have involved someone from our side of the pond into the discussions around it.

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