Where in the world are the licenses valid?

polyformproject / polyform-licenses

source text for Polyform Project licenses

https://polyformproject.org

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Where in the world are the licenses valid? #67

Open aggsol opened 5 years ago

aggsol commented 5 years ago

I cannot find where those licenses are valid. I live in the EU where there is (afaik) no concept of "Fair Use". How do the licenses transfer here?

ceelian commented 3 years ago

Interesting questions, more than one year later, I was still not able to find an answer to this question. It looks like US only.

kemitchell commented 3 years ago

You won't find this kind of list for nearly any license.

The majority of lawyers involved in drafting the PolyForm licenses were US-qualified. Some of those have limited experience of law elsewhere. We consciously avoided any US-specific terms.

aggsol commented 3 years ago

The European Union has an explicit whitelist for their own open source license. I would recommend EU entities and citizen to use one of the following:

GNU General Public License (GPL) v. 2 & v. 3
Open Software License (OSL) v. 2.1, v. 3.0
Common Public License v. 1.0
Eclipse Public License v. 1.0
CeCILL v. 2.0 & V 2.1
Mozilla Public License v. 2
LGPL v2.1 & V3
LiLIQ-R & LiLIQ-R+
GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) v. 3

Wikipedia

kemitchell commented 3 years ago

Many of those licenses include terms or references to concepts that don't translate to European jurisdictions, or don't translate well.

European lawyers are more than welcome to glance the PolyForm terms. I'd be surprised to hear concerns beyond those that apply to existing public license forms, though of course I don't know what I don't know about foreign law.

Do the folks on this issue have access to lawyers who might perform a quick read and share thoughts?

ceelian commented 3 years ago

@kemitchell thank you for clarification. Regarding European lawyer, I am a tech guy but I can try to reach out to EU lawyers to ideally contribute to this great collection of licenses.

kemitchell commented 3 years ago

We'd love more input from European colleagues.