Re: License survey

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On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 02:55:04PM +0100, Christian Neukirchen wrote:
> Also, please do not reword the BSD license.

I think that removing some or all clauses is not the same as rewording.
This has been done before when we went from 4-clause to 3-clause and
2-clause.  What I propose is 0-clause BSD.

That said, I do see some value in using a widespread license as-is.

> If you want a minimal
> version of it, use the ISC license: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license

ISC license is my second best choice.

> (I think having to keep the copyright note is a good idea, too.)

I disagree; to me, the only good thing about this requirement is that it
is so common, so we can use an existing license template as-is.

ISC license says: "provided that the above copyright notice and this
permission notice appear in all copies."  I think this is somewhat
ambiguous and potentially problematic.  Does this copyright notice and
this permission notice have to appear inside a program binary statically
linked with libc under that license (thus including a copy of the libc
code)?  Does it have to appear in the documentation of such program?
The current practice would be that no, this would typically not be the
case - but is it valid per the license or not?  And should musl start to
provide such a const string for inclusion in all programs statically
linked against musl?  That would be +300 bytes to each binary (not
including the warranty disclaimer), and more once there are multiple
copyright holders to list.  Sure, that's not how we and others interpret
the license so far, so perhaps there's precedent that this is not
required - but strictly speaking that's not what the license says, and
not all countries have precedent law.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

Oh, and this does start to look like a bikeshed, so I think I won't
comment further.  I think Rich merely wanted us to vote, which we did. :-)

Alexander