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

[Thomas Hruska]

On 4/13/2017 10:02 AM, Richard Fontana wrote:
> 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

Three things:

1)  The FPL does not indicate an intent of Public Domain by using that 
exact phrase.  As pointed out in the OSI FAQ, it's a legally defined 
phrase in some locales.  Someone can say something is public but that 
does not place it into the public domain.  Public could just mean 
publicly available and still under copyright.

2)  The MIT license does not include the overly broad phrase "for any 
purpose" and clearly spells out the allowed actions instead.  When 
defining what Public Domain means to a locale without such a definition, 
the approach that the MIT license takes is such that there is no ambiguity.

3)  The FPL assumes a singular AUTHOR but does not indicate by legal 
associativity who that is anywhere, which, depending on circumstances, 
could render the claimed protections by the license as void (e.g. 
someone submits a patch to a FPL repo and later claims that the license 
protects them and not the repo owner).  If the protections section is 
ever determined to be void for some situation, the original owner may be 
left with a license that effectively says "use ... for any purpose", 
which includes things like lawsuits.

-- 
Thomas Hruska
CubicleSoft President

I've got great, time saving software that you will find useful.

http://cubiclesoft.com/