David Gerard wrote:
Remember that licenses are not merely a game of Nomic, but responses to a given legal threat model.
Not necessarily a "given" legal threat, but an even weaker "perceived" legal threat.
In this case, the threat model is: what if some raving and/or malicious lunatic who has copyright on a piece of this thing drags someone into court over it?
Copyright paranoia exists as a socially acceptable response to raving lunatics.
The reason for the license is so that the defendant can point at the license and say "I can do this per the license." (And probably "and per common practice," because law is squishier than Nomic.)
That, but also it gives a legal right of action as plaintiffs to the lunatics.
So the aims of the suggested terms for relicensing will not be to achieve some theoretical outcome that makes everyone as happy as possible, but to provide sufficient results to be usable in terms of:
- giving reusers confidence they can defend themselves against a
raving and/or malicious lunatic in court; 2. not pissing off so much of the community they fork.
That makes sense.
Ec