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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.



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.


4 reasons:

1. It's hard work summarizing licenses. I'd like to give people a chance to get credited for their contributions to the community and be social about licenses.

2. A little harder to make bold/troll edits if all of them are moderated by both license submitters and admins on the site. Any information around legal things are very sensitive and impactful - although TLDR doesn't claim to be a law firm or provide legal advice, we still try our best to have good quality content.

3. Future ability to build tools for the community on this dataset, where data is attached to user accounts.

4. Easier way to understand how many people are participating and announce new, important features.

Finally, TLDR doesn't encourage you to ignore the license. It provides you an out before you delve in deep.




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