Modifying existing licenses in minor ways

[Adam C. Engst]

Hey folks,

A quick question. If you want to adopt an OSI-certified license to 
avoid the proliferation of yet more open source licenses, how do you 
deal with the fact that many of the open source licenses have 
specific language that doesn't make sense if used by any product 
other than what the license was generated to address?

For instance, in the Python license, item 1 starts "1. This LICENSE 
AGREEMENT is between the Corporation for National Research 
Initiatives...." How could anyone else use that license without 
changing it, since CNRI wouldn't be involved in other products?

Similarly, the Apache license says "The end-user documentation 
included with the redistribution, if any, must include the following 
acknowledgment: "This product includes software developed by the 
Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org/)."" But that makes 
no sense if another product were to use the Apache license.

The BSD license is good about this, providing a template to be filled 
in, but other approved licenses have different aspects that can make 
them more attractive in specific situations.

What then is the appropriate course of action if you need to make 
minor changes to eliminate things like mention of Apache in your 
documentation? On first blush, it would seem to make sense that some 
minor things could be changed without needing re-certification by the 
OSI board, but I tend to think that that's unlikely, since there's no 
way to know what OSI would consider minor without them seeing the 
actual changes. If that's the case, is it true that any change at 
all, no matter how minor, requires re-certification?

cheers... -Adam

______________________________________________________________________
Adam C. Engst, XNSORG President                  XNS Name: =Adam Engst
                Email: <ace at xns.org>         Web: <http://www.xns.org/>