[License-review] Proposal for OSI Approval track: Modified MIT License for Public Domain software

[Richard Fontana]

On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 08:12:59AM -0700, Thomas Hruska wrote:
> For a project I worked on a few years ago, I needed a license that would
> excuse Copyright wherever possible while simultaneously offering the legal
> protections of other licenses.  None of the existing OSI licenses or license
> models particularly fit my needs.  So I started with the MIT license, an
> already OSI approved license, as a base.  At the time, I already utilized
> the MIT license extensively with my own software and knew it very well.  It
> was and still is a well-written document with strong legal defenses in a
> succinct package.  It is also the closest thing to a Public Domain license
> that OSI has to date.  All of those are highly desirable baseline
> attributes.

Are you aware of the Free Public License 1.0.0, also known as the
Zero-Clause BSD license?

https://opensource.org/licenses/FPL-1.0.0

It appears to do the same thing you are trying to do, except that it
is based on the ISC license rather than the MIT license.

Do you see anything distinctive about your license relative to
FPL/0BSD?

Richard