[License-review] Please stop deadnaming 0BSD.

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Sun Apr 4 10:57:42 UTC 2021


In 2018 OSI held a vote to rename 0BSD (not dual-name it):

http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-November/003830.html

The license both shipped in Android M and was approved as Zero Clause BSD by
SPDX before it was ever submitted to OSI under a different name. The person who
submitted it to OSI under another name is on record as not minding calling it
0BSD, he just wants to see it used. Kirk McKusick has approved calling it Zero
Clause BSD.

  https://landley.net/toybox/0bsd-mckusick.txt

A single OSI board member came to the SPDX mailing list in 2015 to defend OSI's
conflicting position, and was denied by SPDX. That same OSI board member was the
main voice objecting to the discussion here in 2018 when I raised the issue of
acknowledging the license's original name and conforming to SPDX, but his
position was voted down.

At the time I assumed this board member was the one who memorialized the dispute
with a single "yeah but" note in OSI's 0BSD page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181219001235/https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD

I noted at the time that this struck me as problematic, but chose not to raise
the issue here because letting this person "have the last word" seemed prudent:

  https://landley.net/notes-2018.html#14-11-2018

Unfortunately, since then someone has changed OSI's page to put the dead name as
a prominent dual name, in boldface next to the official name and also in the
page title:

  https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD

Which was then propagated back to wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=BSD_licenses&type=revision&diff=1007661505&oldid=1007656464

Could someone please point me to where in the archives this issue was raised
again and voted on again to change the name back without notifying me the issue
was once again in dispute?

If there wasn't a second vote changing the name again, and "0BSD" is still the
acknowledged name for it, could OSI please remove all mention of the no longer
relevant deadname from the 0BSD page? It does not need a "historical" mention
because it was not what the license was called when it was created and is not
what the license is called now. It does nothing but cause market confusion (Free
as in Free Software Foundation, on the GPL side of GPL-vs-BSD axis, it must be
REALLY viral), and apparently if we don't remove all of this tumor it metastasizes.

Thank you for your time,

Rob

P.S. My apologies if I come off a tad frustrated.



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