[License-discuss] stale link in license terms

[Philippe Ombredanne]

Hi Geoffrey:

On Sat, Mar 16, 2024 at 1:45 PM Geoffrey Coram <gjcoram at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I work on some industry standards that are license under the Educational Community License, version 2.0. A copy of that license can be found here:
> https://opensource.org/license/ecl-2-0
>
> The appendix "How to apply ..." says
> "You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.osedu.org/licenses/ECL-2.0"
>
> However, that link takes me to a page that says "No Results Found." The site seems to have gotten out of the business of hosting licenses.
>
> Wikipedia provides this link: https://spdx.org/licenses/ECL-2.0.html
> which also points to the osedu.org site.
>
> Is it "legal" to change the appendix of the license to supply a valid URL?

Legal or not, this is IMHO a bad idea in general as some tools that
compute exact checksums on the license text will get fooled (not my
tools). Feel free to draft a notice to use in code header comments
with a proper URL; or even better, bypass the URL entirely and use an
SPDX-License-Identifier: ECL-2.0 tag.

FWIW, the web archive is your friend:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100617144451/http://www.osedu.org/licenses/ECL-2.0/
and the domain osedu.org was likely abandoned then taken over by a
squatter circa 2015.

Other URL to consider: https://opensource.org/license/ecl-2-0
-- 
Cordially
Philippe Ombredanne