[License-review] Please rename "Free Public License-1.0.0" to 0BSD.

[Richard Fontana]

On Tue, Oct 16, 2018 at 02:10:15PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> I did not ask for OSI's approval because nobody brought it to my attention. I
> was _asked_ to submit to SPDX by my project's users. Last I heard of OSI before
> this was that they had said there was too much license proliferation and had
> thus stopped approving new licenses, and SPDX had arisen to fill in the gap.
> 
> I was unaware OSI had started up again, and still don't really understand why.

One thing is that OSI has not (other than at the very beginning of its
history) approved licenses on its own initiative. There is a process
by which someone outside of OSI proposes a license for approval, much
as MongoDB, Inc. today submitted its "Server Side Public License" for
approval, or as Christian Bundy submitted what he called the Free
Public License 1.0.0 for approval.

It's possible that license submissions have been basically constant
but that for some period of time the OSI was less likely to approve
any new licenses compared both to some earlier and later
period. Someone could probably research that if they were
interested. If so that may have had something to do with proximity to
the high point of concern over license proliferation which I would say
existed around the middle of the 2000s.

> OSI explicitly rejected Creative Commons Zero.

No it didn't. There was a discussion of CC0 on this list which was
largely negative, and Creative Commons decided to withdraw the license
before the OSI could act on it. 

> OSI's lawyer (acting in his
> capacity _as_ OSI's lawyer) compared placing code in the public domain to
> abandoning trash by the side of the highway (no really, paragraph 5 of
> https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6225 ).

That was from a much earlier period -- 2002 -- and he wasn't the only
person active in open source legal circles who held a view like that
in those days. 

> I only heard about your "Free Public License" mistake when you (Richard Fontana)
> contacted SPDX and asked them to change an existing decision which predated your
> entire approval process.

Which related to the agreement or understanding between OSI and SPDX I
referred to in another message.

> I pointed out to SPDX I'd been publicly using this license for 2 years before
> OSI ever heard of it, that SPDX's approval process had concluded before it was
> ever submitted to OSI, and that OSI's own policy of staying in sync with SPDX
> means that OSI is clearly the one that dropped the ball here.

It's more that SPDX which tries to stay in sync with OSI, not the
reverse, which wouldn't make much sense. Again, OSI certifies licenses
(as conforming to the Open Source Definition); SPDX maintains a list
of license identifiers for (currently) a few hundred licenses.

> I pointed out at the time that OSI hasn't got a procedure for admitting it made
> a mistake. That's why _you_ asked SPDX to retroactively change its existing
> decision to conform to the mistake OSI made after SPDX's public decision process
> had concluded and the results announced.

OSI didn't make a mistake. Someone (Christian Bundy) submitted a
license for approval, it was discussed (fairly thoroughly as I
recall), and it got approved by the OSI, naturally using the name
proposed by the submitter. In the public discussion no one mentioned
that it was already in use in Toybox -- probably no one involved in
the discussion knew. No one knew that it was basically identical to a
license you had started calling Zero Clause BSD.

> > I myself just did some searching and, contrary to what I expected to
> > find, I think "Free Public License 1.0.0" is in greater use today than
> > "Zero Clause BSD"
> 
> Links please?

If I have the time I will try to re-create the searches I did. 
 
> SPDX uses "4bsd" for "four clause BSD", "3bsd" for "3 cleause BSD", and so on.
> That's why they wanted to use 0BSD as the abbreviation (instead of my suggested
> BSD0), for consistency with their other

No, they don't! They use (much to my personal disappointment, but I'm
mostly over it by now) "BSD-4-Clause", "BSD-3-Clause",
"BSD-2-Clause". I imagine the reason they didn't repeat the pattern
with Zero Clause BSD ("BSD-0-Clause") is that it's descended from the
ISC license and not the BSD license.

> SPDX has 10x the reach of OSI these days, but you've run a very
> effective (if unintentional) smear campaign against 0BSD by implying it's a Free
> Software and thus copyleft license,

A lot of us see "free software" definitionally as the FSF does:
encompassing both copyleft and noncopyleft free software. The ISC
license is a free software license (and an open source license). What
you call Zero Clause BSD is without question a free software
license. As far as I can tell, the idea that "free software" means
"copyleft" is something that seems to have originated with certain
people associated with the Apache Software Foundation around 2009 or
so (I attempted to trace it once). I am not a prescriptivist but I see
"free software == copyleft" as a minority usage, probably dwindling,
and associated mainly with critics of copyleft licensing, and one
rejected by the FSF itself.

Richard