[License-review] Suggested MirOS Licence wording change: editorial or substantial?

[Richard Fontana]

On Mon, 9 Sep 2013 18:17:18 +0000 (UTC)
Thorsten Glaser <tg at mirbsd.de> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I’ve received a suggestion to change the wording of The MirOS Licence
> to avoid hyphenation, using normal Open Source user feedback channels:
> 
> --- current
> +++ suggested
> @@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
>  Provided that these terms and disclaimer and all copyright notices
>  are retained or reproduced in an accompanying document, permission
> -is granted to deal in this work without restriction, including un-
> -limited rights to use, publicly perform, distribute, sell, modify,
> -merge, give away, or sublicence.
> +is granted to deal in this work, and to do so without restriction,
> +including unlimited rights to use, distribute, modify, sublicence,
> +sell, give away, merge, or publicly perform.
> 
> The changes are:
> 
> • “to deal in this work without restriction” got changed to
>   “to deal in this work, and to do so without restriction,”
> 
> • the rights were shuffled (but not changed)
> 
> Is this an editorial change (that doesn’t mean a change to the
> licence, doesn’t mean we need to version it and reapply)?

My personal view is that this revised version should not be
characterized as an OSI-approved license, even if the revisions here
are justifiably considered 'merely editorial'. You could say it's very
similar to an OSI-approved license, and point out the degree of
similarity.

- RF