[License-discuss] Non-attribution license variants

[Rob Landley]

On 1/3/24 23:56, Jeff Johnson wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I'm wondering the best way to go about distributing some files in
> an ICU Licensed project, but without requiring any attribution.

May I suggest Zero Clause BSD:

https://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html
https://opensource.org/license/0bsd/

Created in 2013:

https://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/264b9da809df
https://landley.net/toybox/license.html

Merged into Android in 2014 (shipped in Android 6.0 "Marshmallow"):

https://lwn.net/Articles/629362/

SPDX short identifier "0BSD" was granted in 2015:

https://lists.spdx.org/g/spdx/message/967

In the github choose-a-license pulldown since 2019:

https://github.com/landley/toybox/blob/master/LICENSE

Currently over 50k repositories there licensed under it:

https://github.com/search?q=license:0bsd&type=Repositories

Zero Clause BSD is the "OpenBSD suggested template license" with half a sentence
removed. The openbsd license is actually an ISC derivative (not from berkeley)
but OpenBSD is one of the 3 main BSD distros, and I got permission from Kirk
McKusick to call it a BSD license in 2013. (He was a Guest of Honor at Ohio
Linuxfest's celebration of the 45th anniversary of Unix. I also got to sit next
to Doug McIlroy at dinner there.)

https://landley.net/toybox/0bsd-mckusick.txt

The discussion that led to Github adding 0BSD to choose-a-license had large
infodumps about how and why the license came to be, if you're curious:

https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/issues/464#issuecomment-289236817
https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/issues/464#issuecomment-289526758

The technical category is "public domain equivalent license":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-domain-equivalent_license

The logic for the name was "Your Fortune 500 legal department has already
approved 4 clause BSD, 3 clause BSD, and 2 clause BSD... here's another one for
rubber stamping." And given that even Microsoft's using it...

https://github.com/microsoft/tslib/blob/main/LICENSE.txt

Rob