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

[Smith, McCoy]

>>Some comments on your comments below.<<

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.

>>The current draft just says " Public Domain or legal equivalent "  Have you confirmed that that statement is legally effective to result in a dedication to the public domain?  I know CC did a lot of work and research into how (in many jurisdictions) one goes about making a legally effective public domain dedication, and the wording they use in CC0 is much more comprehensive in the language it uses (in Sec. 2).  The language you use is quite brief and I'm curious if that's all that's required in the jurisdictions that allow public domain dedications.<<

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.

>>I didn't see the phrase "for any purpose" in the text of the license you submitted.  You might want to update the draft to include that if that is intended (and if it is an addition to the license grant, explain how that phraseology makes a difference to the "without restriction" language already in MIT.<<

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.

>>I think you need to be careful in using the term "author" in this license (although I think you believe it not to be a license, although that's not clear to me, and given the way that CC0 is structured, I'd think you'd want a back up license); that's a term of art in copyright law (as well as in the US Constitution) and by using that terminology, you might be preserving an argument that it does indeed preserve some copyright rights or does not act as a complete public domain dedication.  CC0 uses "affirmer."<<