ISC copyright for BIND

[Ernest Prabhakar]

There seems to be some confusion here.   Comments below.

On Oct 15, 2004, at 9:25 AM, Zvezdan Petkovic wrote:

> I wonder why somebody doesn't start a procedure for including ISC
> license (used for BIND nameserver) in Open Source Licenses.
> You can see it here:
> 	http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/sw/bind/bind-copyright.php

It sounds like you just did. :-)  Typically the author of the license 
submits it for consideration, though I don't think that's strictly 
necessary.

> It is basically equivalent to BSD license.
> OpenBSD project recommends it for the new code added to the project.
> This page http://www.openbsd.org/policy.html states:
>
> 	The ISC copyright is functionally equivalent to a two-term BSD
> 	copyright with language removed that is made unnecessary by the
> 	Berne convention. This is the preferred license for new code
> 	incorporated into OpenBSD. A sample license is included in the
> 	source tree as /usr/src/share/misc/license.template.

This does seem to be a reasonable subset of the BSD license.   Normally 
we discourage new licenses, but since this a historical one from the 
ISC I would recommend approval.

> Since Open Source Consortium requires that a lawyer reviews the 
> license,
> I cannot afford that as an individual.  However, I think it's a shame
> that a license used by one of the most important programs for Internet
> is not yet approved by Open Source Consortium.  And frankly I doubt 
> that
> this restrictive procedure with lawyer review was applied to GNU, BSD,
> MIT licenses when they were approved by the consortium.  They were just
> taken as the reference open source licenses that started the whole
> thing.  I believe that ISC license falls in the same category.

I'm not sure what you mean by "Open Source Consortium."  This list is 
run by the Open Source Initiative, and AFAIK there's not strict 
requirement for prior legal review -- though it is strongly suggested 
for various reasons.

-- Ernie P.
IANAL, TINLA, etc.
Disclaimed: Apple partners with the ISC on OpenDarwin.org, and uses 
BIND.