From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.lib.musl.general/9741 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Rob Landley Newsgroups: gmane.linux.lib.musl.general Subject: Re: musl licensing Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2016 17:53:52 -0500 Message-ID: References: <20160317081748.GF13856@example.net> <20160317160131.GE21636@brightrain.aerifal.cx> <20160318042158.GN21636@brightrain.aerifal.cx> <20160318191209.GQ21636@brightrain.aerifal.cx> <20160319043547.GS21636@brightrain.aerifal.cx> <20160323023221.GJ21636@brightrain.aerifal.cx> Reply-To: musl@lists.openwall.com NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1458773660 26380 80.91.229.3 (23 Mar 2016 22:54:20 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2016 22:54:20 +0000 (UTC) To: musl Original-X-From: musl-return-9754-gllmg-musl=m.gmane.org@lists.openwall.com Wed Mar 23 23:54:07 2016 Return-path: Envelope-to: gllmg-musl@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from mother.openwall.net ([195.42.179.200]) by plane.gmane.org with smtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1airfD-00038m-4D for gllmg-musl@m.gmane.org; Wed, 23 Mar 2016 23:54:07 +0100 Original-Received: (qmail 13468 invoked by uid 550); 23 Mar 2016 22:54:05 -0000 Mailing-List: contact musl-help@lists.openwall.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-ID: Original-Received: (qmail 13444 invoked from network); 23 Mar 2016 22:54:04 -0000 DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=landley-net.20150623.gappssmtp.com; s=20150623; h=mime-version:in-reply-to:references:date:message-id:subject:from:to; bh=E6UwE6xch7pnr8xfPJADaqG1oii7gP3eev9cj+m739E=; b=w+XlcOB9MiBrbh56Tey0kyG7iF0Jbmfbke9D7aPOwsM7f+scaykZr+c0et+e1eWEAJ E/pbdMbW30cf6tgMaD1hPCbUGnCU0vwhMze366i2GXOakmWfawToGy/5nz6fWhNn+kUg +gIxfillXR54kEN0vXOWK9ISzYi/pmh1ZoOOckrlJdJHjjBeW2//TnfL0XERBpwIMHRf 5s1IhdKFdhFZIdeQ6XK1aZ8OxoPEagN+plIhywhIA+6HdgZMdlezpQ7xbjG0LQPYJNH8 NyDyhCbnGTyL2pzdfG8+ESTpHBNWGimv+A1TDw2uPTPR3q7ZlVEY+F5fd1rwN8Xqdme6 VtaA== X-Google-DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=1e100.net; s=20130820; h=x-gm-message-state:mime-version:in-reply-to:references:date :message-id:subject:from:to; bh=E6UwE6xch7pnr8xfPJADaqG1oii7gP3eev9cj+m739E=; b=aAOwl0p4vYEBpBSUqRiSqKbEJ+gBTgDrx6IRzpsxBl7Ujlh+GYQWRmVYhsbkeR9vIT 6GwpWzERVOuC1QtDY4QqSoErBizX6gUgCAD1rOzfwS+RKZdC3oNzU465IRrLMoYEJDf8 Po6KdTe+SjeMiC7Ye+u0fwapQli5IDC2riQg/cgx4JbQZrJTMs8djl2TuCv8KXJr1kCM 4XlJOJTpOHEtwrEy7IiffJcqHXZcw2x0qswyUIf/J3xicrQMMIcMgPSS0Fn6YfH/7msK Nukh6ns/6XzpWW5+2Euk7YkDMJRgRaM3PbO+ajUOVqUklAAgsuMgajoBgqi2fik7sZQ1 1ptA== X-Gm-Message-State: AD7BkJJJyzLmEJjp/XDc4cuj6fpjk3jpjmtks8Qpt6P1kMU7zcLAocuk+1yxMgBkz1Dv2/oIoAtc4h5V1eMkEg== X-Received: by 10.176.7.68 with SMTP id h62mr2452034uah.59.1458773632478; Wed, 23 Mar 2016 15:53:52 -0700 (PDT) X-Originating-IP: [172.56.7.12] In-Reply-To: Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.linux.lib.musl.general:9741 Archived-At: On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 3:35 PM, Christopher Lane wrote: > On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 7:32 PM, Rich Felker 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 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. 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. 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