Re: musl licensing

[FRIGN <dev@frign.de>]

On Tue, 15 Mar 2016 14:59:24 -0700
Petr Hosek <phosek@chromium.org> wrote:

Hey Petr,

> The first issue is the lack of clarity around per-file licensing and
> copyright attribution. The other issue is the claim that some files
> (in particular, the public headers and C runtime) are in the public
> domain. While this might be technically correct, it's not legally
> sound and we would be legally unable to use these files without them
> being placed under copyright and an open source license. The most
> appropriate way of addressing both issues would be to include a
> copyright notice in individual source and header files.

in my opinion, it would be too much hassle and bloat up the tarballs
adding a license header to each particular single source file.
At suckless.org we solved this by having one central LICENSE file and
adding the remark

	/* See LICENSE file for copyright and license details. */

at the top of each source file.
The transition would be seamless, as there won't be need to add such a
notice at the top of the public domain licensed source files.

However, I have the strong opinion that there should be an initiative
to make musl licensing a bit more homogenous.
For non-copyleft licenses, I see only two valid candidates nowadays:

   - ISC[0] if you want attribution.
   - 0-clause BSD[1] if you don't want attribution (ISC without the
     attribution half-sentence)

This entire public-domain thing is built on a very loose foundation.
What more do you want than ISC or the 0-clause BSD?

An added bonus is that the ISC license is functionally equivalent
to the 2-clause BSD license modulo the text segments superfluous
since the Berne Convention of 1971. I use it for all new projects,
and as far as I know it's even okay to change BSD-2 to ISC without
asking the contributors (as they're functionally equivalent).

> Rather than working around these issues by reimplementing parts of
> musl, we would like to work with the musl community to directly
> address these issues. We believe that our company's interpretation of
> the copyright and authorship is the same across the entire industry
> and resolving these issues would benefit both musl as well as projects
> which already do or plan to use musl.

Agreed, and I must admit that I understand Google's position here.
A "public domain" "license" is not accepted by all legislations and
is considered all rights reserved there.
The company does not want to risk a lawsuit when the licensing situation
has not been clarified.

> To address both issues, authors of all files in musl that are "public
> domain" or any other non-license will have to agree with relicensing
> their work under the MIT license (or any other compatible open-source
> license). Furthermore, all past and future contributors will have to
> to sign the Contributor License Agreement (CLA). Since the majority of
> musl authors are present in this forum, we're reaching out to you to
> ask whether this is something you would agree with and also to start
> the discussion within the wider musl community.

There's no need for a CLA when the relicensing happens at upstream,
knowing of course the internal practices regarding CLA's at Google.
I would not recommend the MIT license in favor of the licenses mentioned
above (ISC[0] and BSD-0[1]).

Cheers

FRIGN

[0]: ##########
Copyright (c) Year(s), Company or Person's Name <E-mail address>

Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or 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.

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[1]: #########
Copyright (C) 2006 by Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>

Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.

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.
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-- 
FRIGN <dev@frign.de>