For Approval: The Simplified BSD License

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Arnoud Engelfriet <arnoud at engelfriet.net> writes:
> John Cowan wrote:
> > "All rights reserved" has no legal meaning, and is included in
> > many copyright notices (including those printed in books) under
> > the influence of obsolete copyright treaties.
> This is absolutely correct unless you first publish in Nicaragua and
> want protection in Honduras. Or vice versa. And there's a handful of
> other countries in the same situation.
>
> http://homepages.tesco.net/J.deBoynePollard/FGA/law-copyright-all-rights-reserved.html

This ceased to be the case when Nicaragua, the last signatory of the
Buenos Aires Convention that was not also a signatory of the Berne
Convention, signed the Berne Convention in 2000, four years before the
page you quote was written.

I included "All rights reserved" in the license because I have never
seen the license used *without* those words.  Since they are part of
the copyright statement, not the license itself, I don't really mind
removing them, but where do you draw the line?  The "Copyright (c)
<YEAR> <AUTHOR>" idiom is required by the UCC, which is pretty much
irrelevant these days, but not by the Berne Convention; should we
ditch that as well?

In any case, none of this is relevant to the approval process, as it
does not in any way affect the license's compliance with the OSD.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav
Senior Software Developer
Linpro AS - www.linpro.no