[License-discuss] Acceptable LICENSE citation

[Lawrence Rosen]

Nirk Niggler asked:

> I realize including the entire contents is repetitive, but is there 

> an official statement or court case that would justify merely

> saying MIT rather than including the full license?  

 

 

Is there an official statement or court case that would justify going 56 MPH
in a 55 MPH zone?  Are you likely to be arrested for doing so? Will the
judge impose a high fine?

 

Don't quote me.

 

/Larry

 

 

From: Nirk Niggler [mailto:nirk.niggler at gmail.com] 
Sent: Saturday, June 08, 2013 1:18 PM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] Acceptable LICENSE citation

 

Chuck, thanks for your reply.

 

I definitely have seen many people just follow option (2) but my current
understanding is that it is actually unacceptable for MIT license
(regardless of how many people do it). 

 

GPL, for example, goes out of the way to say that it is permissible to
indicate "how to view a copy of this License", which admits the
interpretation that simply linking to a GPL license is sufficient.  

 

MIT explicitly says "The above copyright notice and this permission notice
shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software",
which I interpret to mean that the entirety of the MIT license must be
included.

 

I realize including the entire contents is repetitive, but is there an
official statement or court case that would justify merely saying MIT rather
than including the full license?  

 

 

On Sat, Jun 8, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Chuck Swiger <chuck at codefab.com> wrote:

Hi, NN--

On Jun 7, 2013, at 8:40 AM, Nirk Niggler <nirk.niggler at gmail.com> wrote:
> [ ... ]

> Lots of people are releasing code under the MIT license, which is great
(at least they remember to apply a license :)
>
> However, I've seen people try to apply it in different ways:
>
> 1) just saying "License: MIT" in a README
>
> 2) just saying "License: MIT" in the source code
>
> 3) attaching a LICENSE file to the repository
>
> 4) putting the license text in the README
>
> 5) putting the license text in the source code
>
> The MIT license itself explicitly states that the license text must be
included in copies of the software, so option (5) is acceptable.  Are any of
the other options acceptable?  This wouldn't normally strike me as odd, but
some licenses like GPL explicitly permit users to reference the license.

It's very common for developers to have a short comment block at the top of
each file listing author, copyright + license, and maybe a
version/revision/$Id: $ tag; many IDEs and revision control systems will
create and even populate such fields in a template automatically.  That's
your option (2).

People using software under licenses which are many pages long almost always
invoke the license by reference.  For software licensed under terms like the
BSD/MIT/zlib/X11/etc which fit on a single page, including the license terms
directly aka option (5) is fairly common.

Your option numbering scheme has a fortuitous coincidence: option (4) was
typically found in association with software under the old 4-clause BSD
license containing the "required attribution" clause.

It made for long and highly repetitive READMEs.

People who do not do either (4) or (5) tend to do both (2) + (3).
People who write good READMEs probably include the information as per (1).

Regards,
--
-Chuck

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