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

[Luis Villa]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 6:45 PM, Richard Fontana
<fontana at sharpeleven.org> wrote:
> 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.

I think that's roughly right, though I'm open to alternative points of
view. (I'd make an exception for cases where there is no "standard"
license (i.e., the BSDs/MITs) where clarifying the default text we
present can be a useful service to the community and doesn't make life
substantially more difficult for those trying to handle the number of
licenses out there.)

Luis