[License-discuss] Any Free License, an open source license

Philippe Ombredanne pombredanne at nexb.com
Sat Nov 14 13:51:54 UTC 2015


On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 3:17 AM, Christopher Allan Webber
<cwebber at dustycloud.org> wrote:
[...]
> I decided to author the most open license of all time, for those who
> just can't decide over license minutiae.  Here it is.  Simply copy this
> into your programming headers and you are on the path to maximal
> freedom.
>
>   # <PROGRAM NAME> -- (C) <YEAR> <AUTHOR NAME>
>   # Released under the "Any Free License 2015-11-05", whose terms
>   # are the following:
>   #   This code is released under any of the free software licenses listed on
>   #     https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
>   #   which for archival purposes is
>   #     https://web.archive.org/web/20151105070140/http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

Chris:
This is not a license proper, but a choice among many licenses.
Therefore there is no need for any "approval". Approval would apply to
each individual license and not to all conjunctive or disjunctive
license combinations or permutations, even for a something allowing
anything.

As an aside, this notice of yours is unlikely as open and "free" of
constraints as it may look on the surface. What does any mean? Can it
be a subset of the choices?  What if the terms conflicts? Must I pick
one license among them all? Must I or can I or not pass this choice
downstream? To be clear you would need to address all these (and
likely many other) related issues.... So this may not be such a good
idea after all.

-- 
Cordially
Philippe Ombredanne



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