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

[Rob Landley]

On 10/16/2018 05:20 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
> 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.

It's not your fault, it's the submitters. Got it.

>> 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. 

Hmmm...

https://opensource.org/faq#cc-zero

OSI kept debating until creative commons gave up on you. Again, it's not your
fault, it's the submitter's.

>> 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. 

It's not your fault, it's history you haven't moved to counter or correct. Got it.

>> 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 saw it. Seems hair-splitting to me.

>> 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 is why _you_ approached SPDX and asked _them_ to change their name.

> 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.

So they document what people in the world ar doing, and you pass judgement and
tell people what they should do. Got it.

>> 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.

We disagree on this fundamental point.

> 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.

You are the one who asked SPDX to change, and then when it didn't you asked them
to add another short identifier for basically the same license:

https://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-December/001575.html

>>> 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. 

Seriously?

This is not in good faith.

Rob