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polyformproject / polyform-licenses

source text for Polyform Project licenses
https://polyformproject.org
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Make it clearer what is permitted purpose #88

Open lbruun opened 2 years ago

lbruun commented 2 years ago

As it stands the the term permitted purpose is mentioned several places in the text, yet there's no section named "Permitted purpose". It would make the text a lot clearer if any such reference to the term permitted purpose could be linked to a section which describes what permitted purpose is.

It seems to me that the project has already accepted that the license text format is Markdown, and not plain-text. We are already at the point where license cannot be read and interpreted correctly without proper Markdown rendering*. This is perfectly acceptable in my opinion but if this is already accepted then I think for sure it is possible to make the licenses even more readable, in particular in relation to the permitted purpose term. In the following I continue along the path of using the Markdown features to make the license more readable.

This is what I propose: Whenever the term 'permitted purpose' is mentioned then hyperlink it to a section of that name. For example, consider this revision, where the term has been hyper-linked and there is now a section named 'permitted purpose', to the current revision. Which one is clearer? (obviously I think my proposal is way more clear)

This is not just me. It seems others are struggling too: By making this clearer you can avoid having questions like this one and this one.

*) By the way, if Markdown is the format, then a project should include the license in the root of the project repo (as is the convention) as a file named LICENSE.md rather than as a file named LICENSE. I think this should be noted on the web site. Naming of the file is important as it signals how the file must be rendered before it is read. This could potentially be important in a legal dispute. If the intention of the Polyform License Project is that the license must be read with Markdown rendering then please state this !!

lbruun commented 2 years ago

Comparing my suggestion (right-hand side) with the existing:

2022-10-09 09_48_49-Document1 - Word

(using the Non-Commercial license as an example here)

kemitchell commented 12 months ago

Returning to this PR after a long while.

The upshot here is that v2s of the PolyForm licenses will very likely do away with the common concept of "Permitted Purpose" altogether. We originally used that concept to make it easy to draft multiple licenses, and to make them easier to compare to each other, text-to-text. For v2, we want to emphasize readability for each license on its own.