
TldrLegal – Software Licenses Explained in Plain English - kissgyorgy
https://tldrlegal.com/
======
JoshTriplett
This seems quite nice. Two things I'd love to see, which would make it even
more handy:

\- I'd love to see each license that has a standard SPDX identifier
([https://spdx.org/licenses/](https://spdx.org/licenses/)) include that
identifier as metadata in its tldrlegal record. (And ideally tldrlegal.com
should have a standard URL to reach the one-and-only license corresponding to
a given SPDX identifier.)

\- I'd love to see standardized tags for OSI-compliant Open Source licenses,
GNU-approved Free Software licenses, GPLv2-compatible licenses, and
GPLv3-compatible licenses. (For the latter two, it'd be interesting to have a
generalized tagging mechanism for saying "compatible with (other license
record)", but in practice those are the two cases that matter most, and too
much generality might not be a good thing.)

Also, this site seems to be doing something with icon fonts that doesn't work:
I see missing-character glyphs for characters F098 and F099 where Facebook and
Twitter icons should appear, and an "fl" ligature where a search button should
appear. (Firefox 27 on Linux, in case that matters.)

I also don't see the placeholders on the username, email, and password fields
in the form that pops up when clicking the "Sign Up" link; the placeholders in
the form on the front page do appear. (Consider using real labels rather than
placeholders for forms like that, to make them more accessible.)

~~~
Argorak
The Firefox issue is a classic indicator that the site would work in Firefox
with one additional step and the creators didn't bother checking.

In this case: Firefox expects CORS to load fonts from a different domain, e.g.
CloudFront.

[https://coderwall.com/p/ub8zug](https://coderwall.com/p/ub8zug)

The other classic is that Firefox expects fonts to be served with the correct
mine-type.

~~~
XiZhao
Thanks Argorak, that was just inexcusable laziness from my side -- thanks for
bringing it up.

~~~
Argorak
Also not meant as an offense ;). Its just so telling...

Thanks for taking note.

------
XiZhao
Hey guys, tldrlegal creator here. Just a quick note -- I am really glad to see
discussions about license interpretations here, this is exactly what I hoped
for when I first started the project. As a reminder on tldrlegal you can give
feedback using the black tab on the right and also suggest a change to any
license page by editing it when you're signed in! My biggest goal is to make
sure content on tldr is of the highest quality and I'm really grateful that
you guys are taking the time to critique and raise questions about the ways
things have been summarized. Many of the summaries are outdated, and the best
way for you guys to get your thoughts integrated is to use the editing
features on the site! Tldr - you can edit license content on the site!

------
shortsightedsid
I met a lawyer at LinuxCon Europe last year. One thing interesting she said
was that of all the other professions, a software developer was the closest to
actually understanding legalese. That's because devs understand if-then-else,
switch-case, variables etc.. That's exactly what the legal language style is.

Whereas, said party....

~~~
tzs
They may be good at parsing the syntax of legal text, but in my experience
software people are worse than "typical" people at understanding the meaning.
My hypothesis is that programming gets them used to thinking about things in
absolute terms, and they cannot deal with the fuzziness inherent in law.

~~~
patio11
This is partially because developers have a cultural quirk where they believe
that, e.g., "file sharing is not theft"/"manipulating a URL can't be a
crime"/"laws about disclosing protected information invariably contain a
public policy exception which comports to the temperament of the dev
community" are axiomatic and thereby create an internally consistent legal
system which fails to falsify those axioms but also fails to meaningfully
resemble the legal system we actually operate in. This results in developers
sincerely believe things like "Your Bitcoins are unprotected by the legal
system because nobody can steal a number", which is a proposition that is
absurd to the legal system as "JavaScript is not a programming language" is to
a programmer.

~~~
icebraining
_developers have a cultural quirk where they believe that, e.g., "file sharing
is not theft"_

Yeah. Thankfully, the SCOTUS shares our cultural quirk, as Dowling v. United
States showed.

~~~
loumf
This was a ruling in 1985 based on physical theft laws being applied to
copyright. <s>It also never made it to the Supreme Court.</s> (edited -- sorry
misread this part)

Since then, many other laws have been passed, and it's likely that SCOTUS
would apply those rather than using this case as a precedent. They didn't make
a sweeping judgement about the meaning of copyright -- only declared that a
laws about theft did not apply to copyright. Specific Copyright laws passed
after 1985 would probably still apply.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_\(1985\))

------
einhverfr
It is an interesting project and likely useful.

At the same time, I wonder how clear the descriptions are, particularly of the
permissive licenses (this is a critique, not a teardown). I looked at the
FreeBSD and MIT licenses because of the fact that there is a subtle difference
in the licenses which can cause some confusion: the MIT license explicitly
allows sublicensing while the BSD licenses do not.

The descriptions were good. The MIT description was exactly the way I read the
license text. The 2-clause BSD/FreeBSD license said "you can do almost
anything" which immediately raises the question of "what can't you do?" My
reading of the license is that the answer is "sublicense" (i.e. you can
include the work in product of a different license, but you cannot change the
license on the BSD code in the process of transmitting it, and that this
limitation does not exist in the MIT license, were you can not only change the
license but likely assert status as licensor when you do so). IANAL, but this
is the sense I get from Larry Rosen's book ont he subject.

Again, I don't know that licenses can be perfectly explained in plain English,
so this is a fairly minor concern if the site exists primarily as a
conversation starter rather than something that people want to use as some
sort of authoritative reference.

------
ketralnis
"iTunes" has no results. So I searched "Apple Terms" like the autocomplete
suggests, and get "Nothing summarized yet". No "Fulltext" for that one either.
Why suggest it if you don't have it?

I also can't click the back button from "[https://tldrlegal.com/license/apple-
terms-of-service#changes...](https://tldrlegal.com/license/apple-terms-of-
service#changesets/active"), it seems to send me right back to itself.

~~~
XiZhao
Hey, tldrlegal creator here. Glad to see feedback popping on HN again! Here's
some answers:

1\. You're totally right about ToS. Tldrlegal was just code and OSS licenses
for a while -- I just added terms of service and the apple tos today. They're
in the autocomplete to just feature both types but you're right -- it's
irresponsible to suggest that before it's ready.

2\. The back button issue is just a redirect one from the js routing on that
page. The reason is because it defaults to the first tab link, which is kept
as an anchor for js-disabled loaders.

Thanks for the notes!

~~~
quadrangle
Please don't just duplicate work that is already being done. Partner with
[http://tosdr.org/](http://tosdr.org/) instead

~~~
freudien
These are kids building this product in Silicon Valley.

I'm surprised there isn't more work done already -- this industry is notorious
for having operating inefficiencies.

But hey, that's what a free market is, right? Let the market decide which
competitor is best. These guys are funded and need to generate that return,
right?

~~~
hugoroy
(ToS;DR project lead here)

We’re a not-for-profit. And all our code is at
[https://github.com/tosdr/](https://github.com/tosdr/)

I’m all fine to see other projects tackling the issue. But I’m not a big fan
of closed-source services that exploit people’s participation.

(Or maybe I completely miss the source code to tldrlegal.com, in such case I
apologize! But then, don’t hide it ;-))

~~~
freudien
I was talking about the tl;dr guys :P

------
kudu
I wish the Apache License was more popular. It's in the same spirit as the MIT
License, but it provides more protections regarding patents, for example. This
prevents the "bait and switch" method of licensing a work under a permissive
license but restricting it under patent law.

~~~
jedbrown
But it can't be used by software that chose BSD, MIT, MPL, LGPLv2.1, GPLv2, or
other common licenses. This is fairly benign for an end-user application, but
it's a restrictive choice for libraries.

This is a handy chart: [http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-
slide.html](http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html)

~~~
belorn
Apache is compatible with every one of those licenses except gplv2-only.

Section 4 of the apache license says: _" You may add Your own copyright
statement to Your modifications and may provide additional or different
license terms and conditions for use, reproduction, or distribution of Your
modifications, or for any such Derivative Works as a whole"_ \-
[https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html](https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html)

It can't be relicensed, but people has argued that you can't do that with BSD
or other permissive licenses. You can't take BSD code and make it MIT, which
restricts a MIT project if they want to only use the MIT license.

~~~
jedbrown
I don't interpret that to mean that you can violate the terms of the Apache
license, but rather that _modifications or derivative work_ can bear a
different license. Every user is still bound by the terms of the Apache
license, including the patent indemnification clause which does not appear in
those other licenses. If you disagree, could you point me to a legal opinion?
Note that OpenBSD still ships Apache 1.3 because they believe Apache 2.0 is
incompatible.

[http://monkey.org/openbsd/archive/misc/0402/msg01095.html](http://monkey.org/openbsd/archive/misc/0402/msg01095.html)

~~~
belorn
Of course you can not violate the terms of the Apache license. Similar to BSD
code in a MIT project, you need to follow the original license in order to be
in compliance.

David Wheeler arrows indicate that two licenses may be combined, and that the
combined work can effectively be treated as having the license at the end of
the arrow. If you pull BSD licensed code into MIT, you have to follow the BSD
license and include a BSD copyright notice.

more: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10903720/new-bsd-
license...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10903720/new-bsd-license-and-
apache-license-compatibility)
[http://www.epractice.eu/files/11-04-07_PhL_FLOSS_Licences_Co...](http://www.epractice.eu/files/11-04-07_PhL_FLOSS_Licences_Compatibility_Issues_3.pdf)

------
anjbe
I have to take issue with TldrLegal’s summary of the ISC license:
[https://tldrlegal.com/license/-isc-
license](https://tldrlegal.com/license/-isc-license)

It starts out with, “The ISC license is not very well regarded because it has
an “and/or” wording that makes it (debatably) legally vague.” Um, really?
There is only one person who thinks that: rms. The ISC license isn’t the most
popular permissive license, but it is reasonably common, being used by several
large organizations (like, well, the ISC), and of course by a number of people
for personal projects.

So aside from it not being copyleft, why _does_ rms (and thus the FSF licenses
page) dislike the ISC license? Well, the ISC and Pine licenses both contain
the following wording:

“Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software… is hereby
granted…”

University of Washington apparently tried to claim that this disallowed
distribution of modified versions of Pine. Of course, that interpretation is
completely ridiculous, as evidenced by 1) the reaction on debian-legal
[https://lists.debian.org/debian-
legal/2002/11/msg00138.html](https://lists.debian.org/debian-
legal/2002/11/msg00138.html) and 2) the large number of people who use the
license to this day.

But because _one_ copyright holder interpreted those words in a way that
nobody else does, the FSF has claimed ever since that any license using such
wording is dangerous (not nonfree, just dangerous). Which is silly. Anyone can
misinterpret a license—I have seen several people release code under the GPL
and then try to claim that prevents commercial redistribution. Would the FSF
list that as a reason not to use the GPL? Of course not.

Anyway, the thing that bothered me the most about the TldrLegal entry was the
statement that it’s “not very well regarded.” More accurate would be to say
“not well regarded _by the FSF_”, but even that wouldn’t paint the whole
picture because it doesn’t account for organizations like OpenBSD or ISC who
actively prefer it.

By the way, here’s some interesting reading from Paul Vixie about the history
of the ISC license:
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.protocols.dns.bin...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.protocols.dns.bind/D8VLXloVfxc/4yweyAjRCecJ)
In response to the noise made by the FSF, the ISC changed the “and” to
“and/or,” though of course that didn’t change the FSF’s mind at all. OpenBSD
still uses the “and” wording.

~~~
intenex
Cunningham's law hard at work.

~~~
devcpp
Baader-Meinhof phenomenon hard at work.

Corollary: Nominalism hard at work...

------
STRML
Cool site! I really appreciate this information, you did a great job.

I just wanted to remark on a few UI bits that drove me nuts:

1\. The social links. Not only are they not necessary, but there appears to be
a bug with the Facebook widget (Chrome 35, OSX) that causes it to be about
1000px tall and invisibly cover the entire "Newest" column, making all of them
unclickable.

2\. The expansion of the 'rules' sections on hover. Not only is that
information not really useful in that format (tiny text, difficult to read,
too terse to be useful), the expansion makes it difficult to click on what you
want. It may be best to either omit them or leave them expanded by default.

Thanks for a useful site!

~~~
XiZhao
Thanks for the feedback, I actually really agree with the rules comment. The
old browse ui had these click filters on rules like 'commercial use' that let
you filter on licenses based on rules. The new ui had to retire that for a
bit, but i had requests to keep the rules at least which was easy enough to
do. Unfortunately it's difficult to leave them a open as it drastically skews
how the columns are aligned. I'll keep brainstorming.

------
wes-exp
I hate to be a party pooper, but I think this site is completely naïve from a
legal perspective, and actually harmful. There are many ambiguities not
covered by simple bullet point descriptions. Ask yourself, why are licenses
long in the first place?

I defer to the IT / Digital Legal Companion, by Gene K. Landy, an actual
lawyer:

"The Myth of the Two-Page Contract

... Many times a client has brought us a complex multiyear distribution deal
and wanted a 'simple two-page agreement.' Sometimes, they even ask for a one-
page deal! The ostensible goal is to cut down negotiation time. But for most
negotiated deals, it is a myth that adequate contracts can be short in this
way. If the lawyer tries to comply (and we have tried), the result will almost
always be to make the deal ambiguous. ... Managing complex deals full of
contingencies with as imprecise a tool as the English language is tough
enough; it is not prudent to try (or force your lawyer to try) to make
agreements more risky than they have to be."

The sentiment could not be more clear: all that legalese is in the agreement
for a reason. "Simplifying" licenses into bullet points does not adequately
capture their content, and it is a huge UI fail to make people think that it
does.

Let's start with the site's treatment of GPLv3. You get a few bullet point
labels about e.g. source code disclosure plus a three-sentence summary. "GPL
v3 tries to close some loopholes in GPL v2." Oh, really, what are those
loopholes? No discussion of code signing, patent rights, affero vs. non-
affero, among many other issues.

Even the bullet points themselves do not adequately capture nuance. That the
GPLv3 allows commercial use is technically true, hence the label "commercial
use". However, what isn't mentioned is the fact that the GPLv3 separately
prohibits practically every known business model for profiting from software.

These ambiguities are not minor issues; they are fundamental. Let's not
wrongly give people the idea that complex licenses can be summed up with a few
bullet points, any more than our technical work can be summed up with a few
crappy analogies!

~~~
clarry
I agree that oversimplifying is a problem and the devil is in the details.

Having said that, I believe it's possible to present licenses in an easier-to-
digest way by hilighting specifics and providing examples of real-world
implications that different clauses carry with them, providing perspective
from multiple different view points.

There are many ways to do this, but one method would be to present the visitor
with questions about what he intends to do (or intends to let others do) with
code covered by a given license, and proceed to point out the relevant
restrictions and obligations in that case.

For example, _do you intend to redistribute the work?_

In case of the 2-clause BSD license, this should hilight the fact that for
binary distribution, you are obliged to include the license in documentation
and/or other materials; and perhaps give examples of cases where this might be
a problematic requirement.

For GPLv2, it would have to go into detail about having to provide the source
or a written offer (and then make sure you have the source around for three
years!), etc.

None of this is substitute for actually reading the license texet, but this
sort of a resource could really help people understand points they glossed
over, forgot, or somehow misunderstood, or whose implications (negative or
positive) they did not realize. Add cross-references and people could really
check their undestanding of the license text they've read.

Actually, I was hoping this would be exactly that resource, and that is why I
asked in another comment about whether there's any legal backing behind this
project. Because if somebody is going to write an elaborate guide to some
license, it'd better be good, and not based on common misconceptions.

------
Springtime
Looks promising. Not sure what I think of the concept of a 'Manager' (user who
was the original submitter) being the only one to approve changes, seems a bit
odd considering the rest of the community aspect.

A similar site, tosdr.org, was launched a couple years back to help filter
through website TOS. It lacks a community editable system, and even with
various publicity and funding still has a limited set of sites in their index.

Hopefully this new site can gain more traction and continue to develop.

~~~
XiZhao
Yeah, TLDRLegal is actually older than ToS;DR, and I noticed that the
community there kinda stagnated because editing was so difficult. I don't know
what happened to them after they got their 10k from indiegogo, but I think
they're still around. The idea of "managers" is to keep an authority reviewing
the content since legal info is sensitive and can be very impactful to people,
but TLDR admins can always transfer management from one person to another.

~~~
jarofgreen
Interesting point about mangers being an authoritative source, but if the
manger is just the first user isn't that a bit arbitrary?

Good luck anyway!

------
delinka
"GPL v3 tries to close some loopholes in GPL v2." And what, in plain English,
would those loopholes be?

~~~
belorn
GPLv2 says: _" You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients'
exercise of the rights granted herein."._

GPLv3 explicit says: _" not allow patents to restrict development and use of
software"_

GPLv3 also say that you can not use hardware restrictions as a trick to
circumventing the no-further-restrictions legal requirement.

One could argue that GPLv2 already include everything GPLv3 do in form of that
single line. Doing such interpretation would for all practical purposes
upgrade every gplv2-only project to the same conditions as of GPLv3 (but with
fewer license compatibilities). The FSF clearly decided not to go that route,
and created the GPLv3.

------
wreegab
As a software developer, I want people to use my stuff. Once over the hurdle
of writing something that people might find useful, I have to choose a
license. When it's a library, I usually choose something without much
restrictions, like MIT or Apache v2, or else developer will just go look
elsewhere.

However there is a project which is a full blown application, and I went
GPLv3, because I want anybody to be able to use it, or fork it. However it
would bother me if someone was using this project to earn money, as I
personally forfeited deriving any income from this project (not even
donations). Apparently GPLv3 allows commercial use (I didn't realize that when
I picked the license).

What license would best match my concerns?

~~~
lambda
There are no common open source licenses which forbid commercial use, as that
is against the various different guidelines for what constitutes open source
or free software (the Free Software Foundation Free Software definition:
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-
sw.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html), the Debian Free
Software Guidelines:
[https://www.debian.org/social_contract](https://www.debian.org/social_contract),
or the Open Source Definition: [http://opensource.org/osd-
annotated](http://opensource.org/osd-annotated)).

Probably the closest you can get in the form of commonly recognized license
that meets those criteria is the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
ShareAlike license: [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-
sa/4.0/](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). It was designed
for creative works (books, movies, music, and so on) rather than software, so
it doesn't address some technicalities that come up in the software field, but
it is a license which allows modification and redistribution but not
commercial use.

However, you have to ask yourself, why do you want to do this? Are you
planning on selling the software commercially yourself? If someone else
happens to make some money by adding features to your software and releasing
them back to the community for anyone to use (which they are required to do
under the terms of the GPL), does that actually hurt you? Or if they don't
change it and just sell it straight, why would anyone buy that over the free
version?

Why did you voluntarily forfeit making any money, even donations? Would you
accept donations if offered? How about accept a contract to add a particular
feature? If you won't accept that, why would you want someone else not to be
able to accept such an offer to add a given feature? If your users are willing
to pay for development, but you don't want to accept the money, should someone
else not be able to accept the money, put the work in, and release their
changes under the same license?

I would recommend sticking to the GPLv3. Most of the kinds of commercial use
that are actually objectionable, like adding proprietary features and selling
that version at a premium, are not possible under the GPLv3.

~~~
quadrangle
As you say, CC licenses are not appropriate for software. The CC-NC clause is
also bad for ANYTHING because non-commercial clauses are bad and incompatible.
The PRIMARY effect of an NC clause is to be a Wikipedia-incompatible clause,
regardless of whether there's ever any commercial use or not.

See
[http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC](http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC)

~~~
lambda
I agree with you, I was just trying to answer his question while at the same
time trying to clarify why he felt like a non-commercial clause was necessary.

------
Strilanc
I noticed that the BSD 2 has a 'CANNOT' group that says:

> _Hold Liable_

> Describes the warranty and if the software/license owner can be charged for
> damages.

which reads awkwardly.

It's like someone was describing the category "Hold Liable" instead of what
the BSD2 license says about liability. Most of the descriptions have this
problem. Something like "The software/license owner can't be charged for
damages or shortcomings." might flow better, though that implies having
descriptions for both the positive and negative case.

 _edit_ Oh, normally the descriptions are hidden (with scripts enabled). So
it's as if I asked "what is it?" by clicking and the description is the
answer. That makes more sense.

~~~
XiZhao
You can suggest changes to any page! Just hot the edit button after you login!

------
NAFV_P
_Software licences for dummies_ \- hell, I'm mostly clueless about this so I
had a good look.

One point I will make is that as soon as you read the relevant material on
this site, you have to go into a dark corner and read the _small print_.

I've noticed the odd comment or two on this page mentioning lawyers. A bit
expensive, but they're the most qualified people to talk to, bar (sorry, bad
pun) judges.

At college, I used to live with someone training to be a barrister. Whereas
the average thickness of my maths and science texts is, say 500 pages, I saw
one book on law hitting around 2,500 pages. It ranks alongside the London
Knowledge for verbosity.

------
clarry
Are there any actual lawyers behind this project? Or is it yet another site
where every other guy from the Internet who thinks he knows what some license
means decides to tell everyone else about it?

~~~
masklinn
> Or is it yet another site where every other guy from the Internet who thinks
> he knows what some license means decides to tell everyone else about it?

Anybody can edit the license summary and attributes, so it's literally "every
other guy from the internet"

~~~
PhantomGremlin
So it's a lot like the following comment which I grabbed from somewhere on the
Interweb:

"Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they
want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible
information." \- Michael Scott

------
rjf90
This is awesome. There are a lot of things I love about this country, but one
thing we've done bad is create lawyers. Where I live (DC) 1 in 12 people are
lawyers.

I wish every legal document carried a tl;dr.

~~~
rayiner
America inherited its legalistic nature from England. Uncoincidentally, the
U.S. and England are two of the most successful societies in the history of
the world. :)

~~~
enraged_camel
This sounds like a massive case of mixing correlation with causation.

~~~
rayiner
Of course its difficult to separate correlation from causation on this
subject. The best study I've seen on the matter (Magee, "The Optimum Number of
Lawyers") doesn't try to detangle the correlation and the causation too much,
though it does try to account for a number of other variables.

That said, its hard to ignore the track record of Anglo law. England was able
to embrace a market economy earlier than its competitors in part due to its
legalistic fixation on property rights. It had well developed legal structures
suitable for bringing private money into the tasks of colonization and empire
building. Its interesting to note that as China modernizes its economy, it is
bringing over American legal experts to update its legal system.

~~~
enraged_camel
Okay, now you seem to be setting up a strawman.

Yes, legal frameworks that support things like property rights are important.
The parent, however, was making a point about how the law has gotten overly
complex over the decades, so much so that we now have an entire cadre of
people whose sole job is to help others navigate that complexity.

It doesn't help that most legal documentation is written in bizarre, arcane
language, as opposed to plain, spoken English.

~~~
rayiner
It's not a straw man, because I'm not using "no law" and "no property rights"
as the basis of comparison. Non-Anglo countries still had law and property
rights. What Anglo countries had, and have, are very sophisticated legal
systems and legalistic societies that leverage the legal system for more
purposes. It's one thing for a farmer to be able to sue someone who takes his
land. It's another for farmers to be able to hedge against bad harvests by
entering into contracts and having the contracts traded as property rights on
derivatives exchanges. The complexity and sophistication of Anglo legal
systems readily support the complex and sophisticated corporate, financial,
and insurance transactions that underly modern economies. It's not a
coincidence that the world's three largest financial centers, New York,
London, and Hong Kong, are all common law jurisdictions based on English
common law.

And complaining that legal contracts are written in "bizarre, arcane language"
seems to me to be like a high level manager complaining about programs being
written in C++ or Javascript, instead of plain spoken English. After all, why
do you need so many lines of this "code" when he just explained precisely
everything the program should do in 15 minutes?

~~~
enraged_camel
>> What Anglo countries had, and have, are very sophisticated legal systems
and legalistic societies that leverage the legal system for more purposes.
It's one thing for a farmer to be able to sue someone who takes his land. It's
another for farmers to be able to hedge against bad harvests by entering into
contracts and having the contracts traded as property rights on derivatives
exchanges.

I think of a country's legal system as a computer program. Anglo countries
have been developing their program for a long time. Therefore, it can do a ton
of different things, including allowing farmers to hedge against bad harvests
in the manner you describe.

One problem is that, as programs get more sophisticated, they also become
slower, and you end up needing to throw more resources at them to make them
run at acceptable performance. This becomes an issue when not every user can
afford those resources: what you end up with is some people running the
program at state-of-the-art hardware (i.e. rich people who can afford
expensive legal representation), and others running it on decades-old hardware
(i.e. public defenders). When these groups are pitted against each other (e.g.
in a lawsuit), one group dominates, either by using the threat of litigation
to force the other side to do something or by winning the trial.

Complexity in programs also cause other problems. For example, as a program
gets more complex, it becomes harder to maintain and debug. If you write new
code, you have to make sure it won't conflict with any of the old
functionality. It becomes harder to test, harder to bring new people up to
speed, and harder to train users because there's just so much the program can
do. The problem is that, while you can refactor a program's code, you can't
necessarily refactor the legal system: it just gets more and more complex,
with no end in sight.

>>And complaining that legal contracts are written in "bizarre, arcane
language" seems to me to be like a high level manager complaining about
programs being written in C++ or Javascript, instead of plain spoken English.
After all, why do you need so many lines of this "code" when he just explained
precisely everything the program should do in 15 minutes?

Programs are written in programming languages because that's what computers
understand. If you wrote the program in plain spoken English, it would not
run. However, _user documentation_ of the program _is_ written in plain spoken
English because that's what the user speaks. The phrase, "To create a new
account, click the 'Register' button," does not require the user to hire a
specialized, highly-paid professional who will interpret it for him.

The law is like, or should be like, user documentation, because it is
ultimately consumed by humans. Therefore it makes sense to write it in a
language that most humans will understand. Right now though, it is written in
the equivalent of a programming language, which is why we need lawyers to make
it understandable. It really is ridiculous, if you think about it.

~~~
rayiner
> I think of a country's legal system as a computer program. Anglo countries
> have been developing their program for a long time. Therefore, it can do a
> ton of different things, including allowing farmers to hedge against bad
> harvests in the manner you describe.

Anglo legal systems aren't more sophisticated merely because they've been in
development longer. It's that English society was legalistic and willing to
readily embrace legal abstractions. Think of the conceptual leap from a
traditional right to property (i.e. the legal system will keep someone from
taking my land by force), to the Anglo notion of property (nearly any set of
rights and obligations between parties can be wrapped into a contract that can
be held and traded like property). The latter concept is tremendously enabling
of markets, but it's not obvious. It was invented by a society that was
totally comfortable thinking in legal abstractions, and that proved to be a
competitive advantage.

> One problem is that, as programs get more sophisticated, they also become
> slower, and you end up needing to throw more resources at them to make them
> run at acceptable performance.

Let's analogize the legal system to a computer operating system. My phone runs
Kit Kat, whose big feature is that it can "comfortably" support phones with as
little as 512 MB of RAM. This is almost 10x as much RAM as I had in my high-
end desktop computer some years ago (PII-era), which ran NT 4.0 just fine.
Operating systems get slower and more complex every year, but nobody seems to
really see that as enough of a reason to forgo the benefits of the complexity.
Nobody cares about absolute overhead, but relative overhead. In the U.S., the
legal sector's share of GDP has been steadily declining since the 1970's.

> The law is like, or should be like, user documentation, because it is
> ultimately consumed by humans.

Legal documents are much more like formal design specifications
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_specification](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_specification))
than user documentation. Legal documents are references against which disputes
can be resolved. Nobody would use user documentation to resolve a dispute
about, say, whether a feature was implemented properly--they'd look at the
specification.

~~~
enraged_camel
>> Nobody cares about absolute overhead, but relative overhead. In the U.S.,
the legal sector's share of GDP has been steadily declining since the 1970's.

Yes, but you shouldn't look at relative overhead in terms of the legal
sector's share of the GDP, because that doesn't tell you the whole story. What
you need to look at is relative overhead in terms of the average person's
ability to afford legal services. Essentially, it comes down to this: if
people are able to use the threat of litigation to bully others because they
know that lawsuits would be too expensive for those others, something is
terribly, terribly wrong.

>>Nobody would use user documentation to resolve a dispute about, say, whether
a feature was implemented properly--they'd look at the specification.

I'd say that if users cannot use the feature because they don't understand it,
it doesn't matter whether it was implemented properly: it's a failed feature.

Essentially what we are asking people is to abide by the law, but making the
law too complicated to understand by the average person. Do you honestly not
see the problem with that? I read somewhere that everyone is a criminal
because we just have too many laws and people break them all the time without
realizing it.

------
dalek2point3
I'm surprised there is no entry for ODbl --
[https://tldrlegal.com/search?q=odbl](https://tldrlegal.com/search?q=odbl)

------
freudien
Social media connect under "Follow tldr" is broken for me (Chrome 33 on OSX).

Also, use "e.g." not "i.e." \-- while similar, the contextually mean different
things. The former is "for example", the latter is "for instance."

Really gave me doubts to the integrity of the website if such a simple grammar
mistake was made on the front page, _in_ the call-to-action.

Food for thought.

------
jaxomlotus
Great domain! See what we did here, where every paragraph is summarized in
human readable English.:
[http://aviary.com/legal/terms](http://aviary.com/legal/terms)

I do think offering this as a service for most companies would be a very
useful (if small) business.

~~~
drdaeman
I really wonder whenever it's possible to write TOS/EULA/alike without the
legalese part, just with plain simple wording and human-friendly style. Had
any lawyer experimented with that, or that's just not possible?

~~~
jaxomlotus
It's probably possible, but trials are decided on the letter of the law, not
the spirit. It's easier for a lawyer to write in legalese then stress about
making human readable words cover all the scenarios legalese was intended to
cover.

------
kyberias
Aargh! Fix that horrible "jumping of links when I try to click them" behaviour
of the page.

------
owl_icecream
This reminds me of -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJuXIq7OazQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJuXIq7OazQ)

"There is not one section... it's just the vibe of the thing"

"I'm afraid Mr Denuto, you'll have to be more specific"

------
ChronosKey
Minor nitpick: `i.e.` should be `e.g.` in this case (for the search field's
hint).

------
LukeB_UK
I saw this linked somewhere else months ago and keep forgetting about it.
Extremely useful if you really don't want to read through a large license file
to see if you can use a library in a project or not.

------
ExpiredLink
Maybe I'm the only one but I don't find this overview convincing.

------
quadrangle
It's totally stupid that this is not itself Open Source.

Otherwise, it's got potential and probably is better than GitHub's
choosealicense thing

~~~
XiZhao
TLDR is actually older than choosealicense

~~~
quadrangle
Actually, I knew that, but I'd forgotten about it until now. My point still
stands that it is otherwise better (it would be if it were Free/Libre/Open
itself)

------
swatkat
Check out EULAlyzer as well:

[https://www.brightfort.com/eulalyzer.html](https://www.brightfort.com/eulalyzer.html)

------
mlubin
Very cool. Missing LGPL v3. I've been looking for a clear explanation of how
it differs from LGPL v2.1.

~~~
XiZhao
Feel free to submit it to the site using the link on the top right!

------
aleem
Could you keep the badges expanded instead of on hover? It would make for
easier comparison.

------
blueskin_
Seems to be missing a few, e.g. Apache 1.1.

------
gkya
Now, I just glanced at the thing, and the very first thing that annoys me is
this: Why would you require an account for submissions? Or rather, why would
you need to have any kind of user accounts mechanism at this site?

The second problem is that the combination of _TLDR_ and _legal_. One should
at least bother to skim through the license of a program they'll use. BSD/MIT
are about 20 lines, and GPL3 is about 700 lines:

    
    
      % find /usr/share/licenses/common/ -name '*.txt' | xargs wc -l        
       470 /usr/share/licenses/common/MPL/license.txt
       193 /usr/share/licenses/common/PSF/license.txt
       151 /usr/share/licenses/common/PerlArtistic/license.txt
       165 /usr/share/licenses/common/LGPL3/license.txt
        88 /usr/share/licenses/common/EPL/license.txt
       377 /usr/share/licenses/common/CDDL/license.txt
        76 /usr/share/licenses/common/W3C/license.txt
        68 /usr/share/licenses/common/PHP/license.txt
       201 /usr/share/licenses/common/Artistic2.0/license.txt
       661 /usr/share/licenses/common/AGPL3/license.txt
       339 /usr/share/licenses/common/GPL2/license.txt
        55 /usr/share/licenses/common/RUBY/license.txt
        63 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-sa-3.0.txt
        61 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-nc-3.0.txt
        12 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-readme.txt
        58 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-nc-nd-3.0.txt
        60 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-3.0.txt
        63 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-nc-sa-3.0.txt
        57 /usr/share/licenses/common/CCPL/cc-by-nd-3.0.txt
       502 /usr/share/licenses/common/LGPL2.1/license.txt
       202 /usr/share/licenses/common/Apache/license.txt
       217 /usr/share/licenses/common/CPL/license.txt
       397 /usr/share/licenses/common/FDL1.2/license.txt
       416 /usr/share/licenses/common/LPPL/license.txt
       674 /usr/share/licenses/common/GPL3/license.txt
        54 /usr/share/licenses/common/ZPL/license.txt
       451 /usr/share/licenses/common/FDL1.3/license.txt
      6131 total
    

One need not be a lawyer to understand what this website offers with merely
reading one of these. Also, there are Wikipedia articles for most the
licenses, and OSI website is quite informative.

This website is unnecessary.

~~~
clarry
The uncountable flames on Web forums, the GPL FAQ, all the questions on the
FSF IRC channel and so on are IMHO enough proof that licensing is complicated
and people have trouble reading and understanding licenses. Correct & well
laid out information about them is hard enough to find. I think a new website
could help with that. It could also guide people in choosing a license for
their code.

Having said that, in its current state tldrlegal isn't much help.

------
sushijain
Very useful.

------
notastartup
what is the best license where you maintain the brand name of the open source
software, and allow end user to modify it according to their needs but not
release it under a different brand name OR use it to run commercial services
off the software (that will require commercial license) ?

~~~
icebraining
Do you really want people releasing code under your brand?

In any case, a license with such restrictions is considered non-free, so you
won't find them on the OSI or FSF. There's CC-BY-NC, but they don't recommend
applying it to software. I don't know if there's any other freely usable
license with such terms, you may need to pay a lawyer to write you one. Or you
could ask, say, the MAME developers if they license you theirs:
[http://mamedev.org/legal.html](http://mamedev.org/legal.html)

------
bib971
This is even a shorter tl;dr: use MIT or Apache. Who would choose other
licenses, more complicated, if they didn't mean to screw you later.

~~~
clarry
You could shorten that tl;dr by removing mention of the Apache license. Which
is much longer and more complicated than the MIT license, and incompatible
with GPLv2 (at least according to the FSF).

~~~
XiZhao
Yeah but Apache gives you an explicit grant to patent rights whereas MIT,
although doesn't explicitly restrict it, doesn't grant it either.

