Quote:
Originally Posted by dwmtractor  At the risk of seeming like a corporate plant (which I'm not) I have to advise the "de-badgifying" crowd to tread lightly. I am not a lawyer either, but something tells me that a software whose explicit aim runs counter to the explicit aim of the attribution in the license, is likely to step in something deep and smelly. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. . .well, you know!  |
Agreed. Such a project amounts to a kind of war-of-legal-technicalities which could only be decisively won by means of an unsuccessful legal challenge to the fork, a process few outside the legal profession would relish.
Disclaimer: Listening to me could get you into all kinds of trouble, so don't do it. Regardless, if you choose to listen to me against my advice, don't sue me!
It is presumably the case that a real lawyer looked at the YPL at some point and said "yeah, this works". For what purpose it was designed to work is less clear. A cynical guess would be: to discourage forking. The simultaneously vague and hopelessly inclusive language of the YPL ("retain and reproduce, any and all ... attribution notices ... in the same form ...") seems to create a fog of legal uncertainty around the project that would serve this end quite cleverly.
Personally, I'm less of a cynic. My guess would be that the YPL is an attempt to compromise between FOSS and shrink-wrap/proprietary intellectual-property models, both of which may have strong advocates within Yahoo. If that's right, the license, IMHO, is just the opposite of clever. Not only because its language is sloppy and unclear, but because badgeware is clearly an inherently stupid idea which needlessly obstructs both FOSS and (arguably) shrink-wrap business models without providing any meaningfully compensating benefits to either.
Remember
this mess? I have always assumed that, given enough time to lie in the legal bed Yahoo has made for itself, Yahoo will rethink the merits of the badgeware restriction and remove it, possibly at some considerable cost. Likewise for all the badgeware projects that have been cropping up lately. Again, the only beneficiaries will probably be the lawyers who will eventually get to sort this mess out.