[License-review] Request for Legacy Approval of MIT No Attribution License

[Pamela Chestek]

To the Board of the OSI and the License-Review list:

Below is the recommendation of the License Committee of the Open Source 
Initiative on the MIT No Attribution License. Pamela Chestek

Chair, License Committee Open Source Initiative *****

License: MIT No Attribution License (Exhibit A)

SPDX Identifier: MIT-0

Submitted: 15 May 2020, 
http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2020-May/004856.html

Decision date: due no later than the first Board meeting after 15 July 2020


License Review Committee Recommendation:


Resolved that it is the opinion of the OSI that the MIT No Attribution 
License be approved as an Open Source Initiative Approved license in the 
Other/Miscellaneous category of licenses.


Rationale Document


The license is the same language as the MIT License except that the 
attribution requirement of the MIT License in its second paragraph is 
removed. The license was discussed on both the License-Discuss list and 
the License-Review list and no one raised a substantive objection to its 
approval. There was some discussion whether the license was actually in 
use, but this is not a basis for rejection that the OSI has applied in 
the past (and the OSI has historically approved newly drafted licenses 
not yet in use).


It is classified in the “Other/Miscellaneous” category because the 
0-clause BSD License is in the same category. Both licenses have the 
same modification to their origin license, which is to remove the 
requirement that the copyright notice and permission notice be included 
in copies of the software.


Exhibit A


Copyright <YEAR><COPYRIGHT HOLDER>


Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a 
copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 
"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including 
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, 
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to 
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so.


THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS 
OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF 
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. 
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY 
CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, 
TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE 
SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.



On 5/15/2020 12:18 PM, Tobie Langel wrote:
> Rationale:
>
> The MIT No Attribution License (SPDX identifier MIT-0 [1]) is a 
> version of the MIT license with the attribution clause removed.
>
> It is used by Amazon[2] and Airtable[3] to license sample, reference, 
> teaching, documentation, and scaffolding code.
>
> It was authored independently by Roman Mamedov[4] and Amazon[5].
>
> It has been discussed on license-discuss@[6].
>
> Proliferation category:
>
> Other/Miscellaneous licenses
>
> Please find attached the full text of the license. It is also 
> available at https://spdx.org/licenses/MIT-0.html 
> <https://spdx.org/licenses/MIT-0.html>.
>
> Thank you for your consideration.
>
> --tobie
>
> ---
> [1]: https://spdx.org/licenses/MIT-0.html 
> <https://spdx.org/licenses/MIT-0.html>
> [2]: 
> http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2020-April/021781.html 
> <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2020-April/021781.html>
> [3]: 
> http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2020-May/021790.html 
> <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2020-May/021790.html>
> [4]: https://romanrm.net/mit-zero <https://romanrm.net/mit-zero>
> [5]: 
> http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2020-April/021759.html 
> <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2020-April/021759.html>
> [6]: 
> http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2020-April/021754.html 
> <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2020-April/021754.html>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> The opinions expressed in this email are those of the sender and not necessarily those of the Open Source Initiative. Communication from the Open Source Initiative will be sent from an opensource.org email address.
>
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