Modifying existing licenses in minor ways
David Johnson
david at usermode.org
Wed Nov 29 22:40:41 UTC 2000
On Wednesday 29 November 2000 07:24 am, Adam C. Engst wrote:
> >Fortunately, the practice appears to be fading somewhat, and projects
> >which have adopted distinctive licenses are either fading or adopting
> >one of the emergent standards (GPL, BSD/MIT, or MozPL).
>
> From this, it would seem that you're saying my concern over making
> necessary modifications to a license is well-founded, and most open
> source projects are dealing with it by adopting one of the licenses
> that explicitly tries to be general. I guess my question remains,
> though. If you do need to make any changes at all, is it true that
> OSI needs to re-certify the result?
I seem to recall an earlier discussion in which the consensus was that you
could modify an existing license so long as the modifications were restricted
to changing the name of the copyright holder and similar fields.
It's also possible to take an existing license as is, then add an exception
clause afterwards that would not technically be a part of the license, but be
an added permission statement. An example of this would be the Linux kernel.
--
David Johnson
___________________
http://www.usermode.org
More information about the License-discuss
mailing list