FOR APPROVAL: The license of Multics

[Matthew Flaschen]

John Cowan wrote:
> I'm going against precedent again and submitting a third-party license.
> A large body of code of great historical importance (the Multics
> operating system) was released under this license on November 9th.

That's great.  I've read a lot about Multics, and it's nice that it's
now (almost) FOSS.

> I think it extremely unlikely that the license will be changed now,

It's not too late, yet.

> or that it will ever be used for any other code.

The historical background in particular could make that awkward...

> I'd like Multics to be officially Open Source.
> 
> As you all can see, the license is a permissive one, although it has
> a long invariant text that has to be carried in the documentation.

So does 3-clause BSD.  This is distinct from the advertising clause,
which had to be attached to any mention of the code in "advertising"
(what advertising is was never defined).

> It's closely related to the 3-clause BSD, and in my opinion is clearly
> Open Source, though probably not compatible with the GPLv3.

Actually, I think it is very close to 3-clause BSD.  Really, the /only/
significant difference is that it's longer (and missing a warranty).

> This edition of the Multics software materials and documentation is
> provided and donated to Massachusetts Institute of Technology

What does this mean?  Does MIT actually hold the copyright, now?  Either
way, I wish the copyright owner would just release it under MIT/X11
(http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php) or straight new BSD
rather than create a new license.  The people who distribute Multics
will probably be glad to discuss the historical background voluntarily.

Unlike GPL's preamble for instance (which does have some FSF-specific
features), this preamble would make absolutely no sense attached to any
other code.

The license is OSD-compliant, but I would prefer not to approve it for
the reasons given above (not too late to use another license, totally
unusable in other code, no warranty, and same effect as new BSD).

Matt Flaschen