For Approval: MLL (minimal library license)

[David Woolley]

Summary.  The intended licence is compliant, but the wording is not 
sufficient to clearly specify the intended licence and the concept seems 
to be based on certain false assumptions and uses practices which are 
not liked in the open source community.  It's redundant.

rlyeh wrote:

>    * My license is either BSD license or MIT license, for both
>      commercial and non-commercial projects. As far as I'm concerned
>      this would allow my users to have a single license and mix well
>      with BSD, MIT, GPL and LGPL (and maybe other) licenses.

You appear to be making a false association between GPL/LGPL and 
"non-commercial".

>    * Software distributed under my license can be used in conjunction
>      with software distributed under other open source licenses, since
>      this license is either BSD or MIT license, and both are valid open
>      sources licenses already.

Whilst it may be true that they are compatible, it doesn't follow that a 
licence being open source makes it compatible with other open source 
licences.

>    * Plain text version of my license follows:
> 
>  Copyright (c) <years> <copyright holders>
>  If this software is part of a GPL licensed software then this license
> expands to the MIT license, else this license expands to the 3-BSD license.

Firstly, licences with specific conditions to make the compatible in 
limited circumstances are not liked in the open source community.  The 
usual issue is licences that only open up when the software is used with 
Linux.  Both options here are open source, and the GPL, v2 at least, 
doesn't seem to have any provisions against this sort of thing, but it 
still isn't good practice.  The normal practice here is to licence it 
under the choice of either or both licences, with no pre-requisite for 
choosing one.

Secondly, I think it is very poor drafting to use such loose names for 
the parts included by reference.  I think the minimum would be to 
include files with the full text and clearly indicate that you intended 
those files, but as both licences are short, I would have thought it 
would be clearest to embed them in full (changing the owner) with a 
prologue explaining where they came from, so that people could recognize 
them without having to compare word by word.

Incidentally, I can't see how this really differs from dual licensing 
under LGPL and three clause BSD.

-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.