[License-review] veto against Unlicence (was Re: [License-discuss] Certifying MIT-0)

[Thorsten Glaser]

Hi Tom,

>Ignoring the legal morass of complexity that is the Public Domain, do you
>honestly think there is any practical risk from honoring an extreme
>permissive license where the copyright holder effectively says "I disclaim
[…]
>I just don't see the copyright holder having any ground to stand on if they

only a quick reply, it’s getting late and I’m buried under work:

The ability of the copyright holders to sue isn’t the only thing licence
review checks for.

Violation of copyright is still a criminal offence, even if not persecuted.

As a software distributor (BSD maintainer, Debian packager) I see an
Open Source licence as a promise to my users that the work they receive
via me as intermediate is something where they don’t need to worry about
hidden “gems”, such as, things like the “Unlicense” or SQLite not being
legally redistributable if they contain code from, say, German coauthors.
This is sometimes not easy, up to impossible, to verify, so, in this case
I’d err on the side of caution and ban it entirely.

Hope this sheds some more light. See also:

http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2020-March/004799.html


Pamela Chestek wrote:

>relinquishment to be. I don't see how a court could misinterpret this
>document in any way that could be contrary to the OSD.

Not having a licence statement founded by copyright protection, for
example. But see above, *I* don’t want to have to be the one to test
this, and I see Open Source licences not just as “could anyone be sued
over this?”, but as a promise of good legal history.


Thanks for your consideration,
//mirabilos
-- 
11:56⎜«liwakura:#!/bin/mksh» also, i wanted to add mksh to my own distro │
i was disappointed that there is no makefile │ but somehow the Build.sh is
the least painful built system i've ever seen │ honours CC, {CPP,C,LD}FLAGS
properly │ looks cleary like done by someone who knows what they are doing