Discuss: BSD Protection License

[David Johnson]

On Monday 11 March 2002 10:38 am, Colin Percival wrote:
> [ Please discuss this license.  Is he reinventing the LGPL? ]
>
>    I submit for your consideration the "BSD Protection License", as found
> at http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/colin.percival/source/BSDPL.html
>    (A plaintext version can be found by s/html/txt/ on the URL.)
>
>    Feel free to redistribute this as relevant (eg to license-discuss); I
> have no desire to remain anonymous (and the URL would identify me anyway).
>
>    The included preamble should clarify the purpose of this license, but to
> summarize briefly, this license has a GPL flavour and a BSD spirit, and
> exists in order to allow closed source use of licensed code, while
> "protecting" the code from having that freedom removed.

The juxtoposition of sections 3 and 4 is somewhat interesting. It's like a 
dual license, with the recipient choosing the set of terms they wish. But I 
would make sure that this point is clarified. This license can easily, even 
commonly, be interpreted as null and void since section 3 and 4 contradict 
each other, with no explicit explanation that one chooses one section or 
another.

It's not a reinvention of the LGPL. It achieves many of the same goals, but 
does so through a completely different mechanism.

I would, however, change the name. It would be all too easy to confuse the 
name with another well known license. It also detours considerably from the 
BSD spirit.

-- 
David Johnson
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