[License-discuss] [License-review] Please rename "Free Public License-1.0.0" to 0BSD... again.

[Pamela Chestek]

On 4/5/21 10:54 AM, Richard Fontana wrote:
> So, to be clear, what happened is that the heading "Zero-Clause BSD"
> apparently got changed to "Zero-Clause BSD / Free Public License
> 1.0.0". It's not clear when this happened. I left the OSI board at the
> end of March 2019 (and also ceased having access to edit the OSI
> website). I don't*think*  I would have made this change without
> remembering it, nor can I think of why I would have wanted to make
> such a change. I had come to be firmly in support of having
> "Zero-Clause BSD" be the single name for the license in question.

I made the change.

> Unfortunately, during Richard Stallman's much-publicized return to the Free
> Software Foundation, OSI has essentially renamed 0BSD back to "Free Public
> License 1.0.0" on its website.
It was made on August 15, 2019.

I made the change, unaware of most of this history, simply because the 
license pages had two names for the same license, with two hyperlinks 
going to the same page. You can see the version on the Wayback Machine 
here: 
https://web.archive.org/web/20190727013543/https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical 
It didn't make any sense to me to have the same license listed with two 
different names as if they were entirely different licenses, so I 
combined them.

The pages have all been updated to remove "Free Public License 1.0.0" 
from the title of the Zero-Clause BSD but, given the fact that the 
license has also been in use as the Free Public License 1.0.0 since as 
early as 2015, I have reinstated the listings under that title on the 
alphabetical and category listing pages too. The statement on the 
license page that the license is not based on the same text as the other 
BSD licenses remains. It's highly relevant to one of the OSI's 
constituencies, lawyers, who do read licenses with care, do understand 
the differences and nuances between the ISC and the BSD licenses, and 
will be aided in their understanding of the requirements of the license 
by having an explanation of its provenance.

The change was innocently made and it's not clear what problem the dual 
listing could have caused; the license was at all times still known as 
the Zero-Clause BSD and any benefit accruing through the use of that 
name would have remained. The suggestion that there was something 
untoward going on and the intemperance of some of the emails complaining 
about it were uncalled for.

Pam


Pamela S. Chestek
Chair, License Committee
Open Source Initiative