Modifying existing licenses in minor ways

[David Johnson]

On Wednesday 29 November 2000 07:24 am, Adam C. Engst wrote:

> >Fortunately, the practice appears to be fading somewhat, and projects
> >which have adopted distinctive licenses are either fading or adopting
> >one of the emergent standards (GPL, BSD/MIT, or MozPL).
>
>  From this, it would seem that you're saying my concern over making
> necessary modifications to a license is well-founded, and most open
> source projects are dealing with it by adopting one of the licenses
> that explicitly tries to be general. I guess my question remains,
> though. If you do need to make any changes at all, is it true that
> OSI needs to re-certify the result?

I seem to recall an earlier discussion in which the consensus was that you 
could modify an existing license so long as the modifications were restricted 
to changing the name of the copyright holder and similar fields.

It's also possible to take an existing license as is, then add an exception 
clause afterwards that would not technically be a part of the license, but be 
an added permission statement. An example of this would be the Linux kernel.

-- 
David Johnson
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