OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English • Hacker News Board

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#101

Post by sirn » Sun, Oct 18, 2015, 3:34 PM UTC

moe wrote: post #62

jzwinck wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with legal markup is the same as with FIX, the financial data protocol (which is widely used). Lawyers (finance people) will never stop innovating (increasing complexity), and they will not be one moment delayed by a protocol which falls short of their aspirations for sophistication (bamboozling). Therefore, the only adoptable protocols are mere transports. They might rigidly specify some commonly used th…

I don't really see that as a problem, that's how all popular protocols evolve. If all exchanges have invented a liquidity-field, then there's a good chance the next version of FIX will standardize it, no? Imho the legal system is very much ripe for digitalization. Both on the low-end (where it pretty much consists of overhead), and even more so on the high-end, where the complexity of legal contracts between companie…

FIX often standardize everyone's favorite custom fields after few years. The problem is that nobody is upgrading yet keep adding custom fields to their implementation, even worse sometimes back-porting tags from newer version but in incompatible ways (5.0 SP2 was released on 2011, but I've never worked with anything above 4.2 that was released 15 years ago.)

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#102

Post by hmahncke » Sun, Oct 18, 2015, 4:18 PM UTC

noonespecial wrote: post #38

So we're at the point now that legal documents need comments to be human readable. I wonder how long it will be until they look like perl.

One company - http://www.legalese.io/turing.html - is working on this, perhaps inspired by Charles Stross' comments on this idea.

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#103

Post by snorrah » Sun, Oct 18, 2015, 4:46 PM UTC

"I can’t sell access to my Mac via any kind of screen sharing."

This one was interesting to me. I thought maybe macminicolo.net might fall foul of this, if they rented out a mac mini to you, but it looks like they instead make you straight-up purchase a mac mini. http://www.macminicolo.net/jvmx_secure_signup.html

I wonder if this term/condition was in previous OSX releases and that's why they went this way, or whether it was a happy accident that they went with users purchasing a mac rather than renting one.

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#104

Post by kec » Sun, Oct 18, 2015, 4:47 PM UTC

jordigh wrote: post #87

anjbe wrote: post #26

I think there’s a lot to be said for a license that’s so simple it doesn’t need a summary. For example, take the ISC license: “Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies. “The software is provided ‘as is’ and the author disclaims all warranties with regard…

Shortness of a license should not be a goal in itself. The GPL is long because without its length we would not have everyone pitching in patches to Linux or gcc for all different architectures. I know non-copyleft licensed software also gets collaboration, but Linux's and gcc's near universal hardware support seems to require the coercion of copyleft. Without copyleft, we would never have had any sort of free Objecti…

As a counterpoint, netbsd has a permissive (3 clause bsd) license and the slogan "of course it runs netbsd". Copyleft definitely isn't required for universal hardware support.

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#105

Post by MichaelGG » Sun, Oct 18, 2015, 4:54 PM UTC

dogweather wrote: post #64

cooper12 wrote: post #29

Does anyone know if #10 changed in El Capitan? I remember reading that Apple allowed hackintoshes.

I never heard about Apple allowing hackintoshes. The thing they DID begin to allow at some point is OS X running in a VM, on Apple host hardware, I believe.

Well they allowed others to sell Mac-compatibles, like PCs. But that was quite a while ago and not hackintosh.

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#106

Post by walterbell » Sun, Oct 18, 2015, 5:00 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #58

threeseed wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

H.264 comprises a ridiculous number of companies. It isn't just Apple. As we saw with VP8 there is no such thing as a truly free and open codec. Back in the day MPEG-LA was going to setup a VP8 patent pool but didn't bother and instead just licensed Google the infringing patents. If they didn't do this VP8 could have been open but not free. There are just too many large and powerful players with competing interests a…

MPEG-LA had a very long time to assemble their VP8 pool, but nothing ever materialized. The impression I got was that Google paid them for silence, in a way that let them save face. Regardless, it's a clear sign that patents are failing our society when it might be impossible to write a free video codec from scratch.

When will the patents expire? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA suggests that new patents are being added to the pool and full licensing fees are needed even if 999 patents are expired and 1 is active.

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#107

Post by moe » Sun, Oct 18, 2015, 5:04 PM UTC

jzwinck wrote: post #85

moe wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see that as a problem, that's how all popular protocols evolve. If all exchanges have invented a liquidity-field, then there's a good chance the next version of FIX will standardize it, no? Imho the legal system is very much ripe for digitalization. Both on the low-end (where it pretty much consists of overhead), and even more so on the high-end, where the complexity of legal contracts between companie…

The next version of FIX can try, but everyone stopped upgrading FIX versions years ago. Also, once you standardize the liquidity field, you need to think about its values. These expand continuously...it used to be two or three values, now some systems use a dozen or more. Basically, if you want a protocol for legal documents, you may as well use an existing one, such as PDF, XLS, TeX, etc. Trying to embed more domain…

Well, let's not forget we're talking about lawyers here, who already work with a versioned single source of truth (The Law).

All I'm asking is that we upgrade their tooling and process.

Your outlook for the abstraction potential seems overly pessimistic.

Most of Law boils down to a cascade of intermingled conditionals, nothing a computer couldn't handle.

Of course a bit of human intervention will always be required, for value judgements and the "hard questions".

However, in my (limited) experience with lawyers, very little of the time and money that a lawsuit consumes goes into the actual decision making.

The overwhelming majority is wasted on process and formalities.

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#108

Post by morganvachon » Sun, Oct 18, 2015, 5:42 PM UTC

cooper12 wrote: post #29

Does anyone know if #10 changed in El Capitan? I remember reading that Apple allowed hackintoshes.

It's not that they allow them, they simply don't go after individual infringers because the effort is far more expensive than the outcome warrants. They have gone after and will surely continue to go after third parties trying to sell Hackintosh machines at retail.

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#109

Post by reagency » Sun, Oct 18, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

burnte wrote: post #32

liquidise wrote: post #7

This was both insightful and highlights, i would argue, an unmet need. I would love simple write ups like this for specific software licenses. In theory, tldrlegal.com is positioned to take this on, but in my experience they tend to deal with more pervasive licenses like MIT, GNU, etc.

I always include a "plain english" copy of my contracts when I send them to customers. I state that it's there for reference only, not a substitute for a lawyer on their part, but that I've made the best effort to make it representative of the contract. Most of my client love it, some don't care, but I think it's something that has helped a lot of folks. I think most contracts should have one.

No competent client, or their lawyer, should trust that summary.

Re: OS X El Capitan License: in Plain English

#110

Post by reagency » Sun, Oct 18, 2015, 6:04 PM UTC

goldmar wrote: post #100

gilgoomesh wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing like that appears in the plain text license here. Are you reading it from somewhere else? In any case, almost all warranty disclaimers start with "TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW" which, under consumer laws in most countries, requires the company to provide a product that can work as shown in all its advertising materials.

> In any case, almost all warranty disclaimers start with "TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW" Which is an invalid clause in Germany and probably most other European countries. Any clause that goes beyond the extent permitted by the applicable law is automatically void in Germany. This is due to consumer protection laws. Therefore, most of these EULAs are probably void if it ever comes to law suit...

You are forgetting what the word "clause" means.