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 to this software including all implied warranties of merchantability and fitness. In no event shall the author be liable for any special, direct, indirect, or consequential damages or any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits, whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tortious action, arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of this software.”
Yes, there are a lot of things it doesn’t cover. There’s no copyleft in this license, and no restriction on commercial use, and so on. Some will argue the problems with that, but it’s also a strength—because the license does less, explaining these concepts is unnecessary, and the resulting license text is much simpler.
There aren’t that many licenses like that. Even Creative Commons summary pages state: “This is a human-readable summary of (and not a substitute for) the license. This deed highlights only some of the key features and terms of the actual license. It is not a license and has no legal value. You should carefully review all of the terms and conditions of the actual license before using the licensed material.” Who actually does that? But it seems dangerous not to.
I could add a single word to the ISC license in order to make it incompatible with every license in existence including itself (to an extent). You can not measure scope or complexity by counting words.
The problem with the "El Capitan License" is not the length but from vague phrases, unlimited scope, and inconsistency. It declare third-party agreements that doesn't exist in the document. It tries to limit fair-use, even if the law do not allow copyright licenses to do this. It tries to be both a sold product, a rented product, and a borrowed product. It try to limit commercial use for a product intended for commercial use.
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 Objective C compiler either, and I'm still waiting for Apple to do good on their promise to free up Swift.
Also, unlike EULAs, the GPL is meant to be understood. Have you read it? It is long, but without reaching EULA lengths, and it's written with clear definitions and a language that aims for clarity. It was written by hackers and lawyers. If you're having trouble understanding it, there's a FAQ:
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.
> The software is provided ‘as is’ and the author disclaims all warranties with regard to this software including all implied warranties of merchantability and fitness. In no event shall the author be liable for any special, direct, indirect, or consequential damages or any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits, whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tortious action, arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of this software.”
Not compatible with law in some jurisdictions. Which is one of the problems with complex licences - the more stuff there is in them the more chance they have of not being compatible with local law.
That's a copyright license, though, which is different from a Terms of Service, which is what the OS X thing is.
A copyright license gives positive rights. It gives you permission to do something that would otherwise be illegal. If you're not big on copyright, it's easy enough to write a very short license that boils down to "I give you ALL the permission."
A ToS takes rights. It's a contract to agree not to do something that would otherwise be legal, in exchange for permission to use the software or whatever.
That's why a copyright license boils down to "You can do A, B, C" while a ToS boils down to "You can't do A, B, C".
You need to agree to a ToS before using software for it to be valid, since it governs usage, and it can't take away rights unless you agree to it.
On the other hand, you don't need to agree to a copyright license, since it only governs copying, and it only grants rights. You only need to read it if you need the rights it grants.
“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 to this software including all implied warranties of merchantability and fitness. In no event shall the author be liable for any special, direct, indirect, or consequential damages or any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits, whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tortious action, arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of this software.”
Yes, there are a lot of things it doesn’t cover. There’s no copyleft in this license, and no restriction on commercial use, and so on. Some will argue the problems with that, but it’s also a strength—because the license does less, explaining these concepts is unnecessary, and the resulting license text is much simpler.
There aren’t that many licenses like that. Even Creative Commons summary pages state: “This is a human-readable summary of (and not a substitute for) the license. This deed highlights only some of the key features and terms of the actual license. It is not a license and has no legal value. You should carefully review all of the terms and conditions of the actual license before using the licensed material.” Who actually does that? But it seems dangerous not to.