For Approval: Allegro giftware license

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Elias Pschernig (elias at users.sf.net):

> Well, the intention was to make it easy to e.g. include the library in a
> open source linux distribution, since there's always the question "are
> you sure your license is open source compatible?" In particular, when we
> asked freenode to add it as a project, they said we should first approve
> the license by OSI.

This highlights yet another reason why you should consider using one of
the standard licences:  When a codebase uses a one-off licence, even an
extremely permissive one like yours, cautious people will not be not be
able to assess its fitness for their needs and compatiblity matrix
without studying it carefully.  Whereas, if for example you use the
standard MIT/X licence, those characteristics are already known, and
newcomers need see only the licence's name to know them implicitly.

Inventing one-off licences without a really, really compelling reason is
pretty much always a bad idea, and hurts your project over the long
term by needlessly putting it in a ghetto of your devising.

A lot of people who've already spent personal time writing such a
licence seem inclined to ignore that consideration.  That's unfortunate.