Re: musl licensing

[Christopher Lane <lanechr@gmail.com>]

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On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 3:53 PM, Rob Landley <rob@landley.net> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 3:35 PM, Christopher Lane <lanechr@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 7:32 PM, Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 03:46:18PM -0700, Christopher Lane wrote:
> >> > On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 9:35 PM, Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > > On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 07:47:21PM +0000, George Kulakowski wrote:
> >> > Those paragraphs still reference public domain.  We can't use the
> things
> >> > mentioned there.  WRT the blowfish impl, there are other
> implementations
> >> > we
> >> > can pull if we want / need that - though I'm not sure we even do want
> >> > that.
> >>
> >> Did they miss the part about the fallback permissive license? I'm
> >> pretty sure Solar's implementation of bcrypt (albeit the original, not
> >> the one he modified for musl) is used in plenty of other places with
> >> no problem. Complaining about copyright status on this is like
> >> complaining about fdlibm. If it's really a problem I suspect he would
> >> be willing to clarify its status for you.
>
> Upton Sinclair explained why lawyers aren't comfortable with the
> public domain a century ago:
>
> http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get-a-man-to-understand-something
>
> As far as I can tell, to most lawyers a good license is one you can
> sue to enforce, I.E. one which provides potential future litigation
> employment opportunities for lawyers. This isn't necessarily a
> conscious decision, but it's definitely part of the legal profession's
> herd mentality.
>

From the license creation standpoint, AFAICT you're right.  Google's on the
receiving end of the musl license, so it seems a "good license" for us is
one that provides clarity on what we can do with the code.  So, the
inverse, basically -- one that we _can't_ be sued over.  A license that
introduces ambiguity through conditionals that may be argued over is not
one we can work with.


>
> So what I did was take a "safe" license and make a small specific
> change to it, which is easy to analyze and hard to object to by
> itself, so the result still looks "safe". Thus my license is a "good
> license", even if the result is functionally equivalent to placing
> code in the public domain.
>
> I.E. Zero Clause BSD (the Toybox license, which SPDX approved as
> "0BSD" ala https://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html) took a prominent
> variant of a widely approved existing license (the "OpenBSD suggested
> template license, the text of which is in the first link from
> http://www.openbsd.org/policy.html) under which you _can_ sue people
> (in fact AT&T lost a very prominent lawsuit about it in 1993,
> https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/bsdi/bsdisuit.html) and made a
> single small edit that just removed half a sentence:
> https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/ee86b1d8e25c
>
> The result was a license which grants blanket permission while
> requiring nothing in return, using existing and established legal
> boilerplate. It had to be an acceptable license if BSD was an
> acceptable license, unless you could coherently explain why the
> deleted half-sentence caused a problem _other_ than no longer
> providing future employment for lawyers.
>
> I replaced the "everybody dislikes this because everybody else
> dislikes this" phrase "public domain" with the "everybody likes this
> because everybody else likes this" phrase "BSD license". Instead of
> fighting the herd mentality, I tried to leverage it.
>

0BSD is awesome, so thanks for your contribution.  It enables projects to
release under something that's effectively public domain w/o scaring off
the lawyers of big litigation target companies.


>
> So far, nobody's wanted to step into the spotlight and say
> "eliminating this source of future litigation threatens my job
> security", and I don't think most people consciously think that
> anyway. (Besides, there's always patent trolls...)
>
> Rob
>

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