Re: Æsthetic Permissive License - For Approval

[zooko]

On Dec 28, 2007, at 2:59 PM, Rick Moen wrote:

> I think you might find, upon examination, that the reception your  
> effort
> has received is closer to good-natured approval of your goal of  
> brevity,
> but otherwise little or no enthusiasm.

I think the positive feedback that Sean Palmer has received is from a  
different set of people than the contributors to this list.

Personally, I would very much like to see an OSI-approved minimal  
permissive licence.  I am not a lawyer, and not much of a contributor  
to this mailing list, but I am an author of open source software.   
Whenever I publish software which I want to permissively licence  
(which is not infrequently), I use the text of my own "Simple  
Permissive Licence" [1].  Unfortunately, if my software gets  
registered in certain databases such as freshmeat.net, then the  
person registering my software (usually me) has to choose from a pre- 
ordained set of licences which are OSI-approved.  When I'm faced with  
that situation, I choose "BSD" from the list, although the BSD  
licence itself doesn't appear anywhere in my source code or docs,  
while my Simple Permissive Licence does.

If there were an OSI-approved permissive licence which were  
sufficiently close to minimal then I would be able to use that  
instead of my Simple Permissive Licence.

By the way, here is the root of the discussion from my attempt to get  
my licence OSI-approved in 2004 [2], and here are your (Rick Moen's)  
later comments in 2007 [3].

Regards,

Zooko

[1] "Permission is hereby granted to any person obtaining a copy of  
this work to deal in this work without restriction (including the  
rights to use, modify, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies)."
[2] http://www.mail-archive.com/license-discuss@opensource.org/ 
msg07044.html
[3] http://lwn.net/Articles/246502/