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by elcritch
2612 days ago
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> Amateurs have no more business playing lawyer and writing general-purpose software licenses than they do playing doctor and handing out surgical advice. It's not thought-provoking, it's dangerous and harmful to people who don't understand why licenses like this could cause them huge unmitigated legal headaches down the road. No, that opinion is fear mongering and damaging to a functioning democracy. Legal contracts are a foundational tool of modern democratic society. To say laymen should never write contracts means to say we should also give up valuable tools to make our lives better. Who do you think wrote the original GPL? According to Wikipedia Stalllman wrote it [1]. I bet many legal experts of the time wouldn’t have recommended the idea of copyleft or perhaps even condoned writing it. Having laymen initiate the contract writing process also helps put pressure to keep contracts in "plain language" as some advocate for [2]. To be clear, one _really_ should have a lawyer familiar with relevant legal jurisdictions to review anything written by a layman (especially oneself). However, it’s important for people to take active roles in the legal process lest it become the sole domain of lawyers. One example I’d construe is as a layman "writing (part of) a contract" would be a new employee requesting a change in an employment contract to change an overly broad IP assignment (say excluding after hour open source work in areas outside the businesses domain). It’s common for companies to just use whatever boilerplate employment contracts their contracted lawyers copied out of some off the shelf contract regardless of how it fits the business or employees. 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#H...
2: https://hbr.org/2018/01/the-case-for-plain-language-contract... |
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