NCSA Open Source License

Bruce Perens bruce at perens.com
Thu Jan 17 00:57:06 UTC 2002


I am corresponding with NCSA regarding some work Open Source work that
they would be doing with partial funding from HP. One of the Open Source
licenses they use is the BSD license, but with the preliminary paragraph
of the MIT license replacing the BSD preliminary paragraph. This creates a
somewhat more explicit grant of rights than the BSD version, but they are
the same rights. Although the NCSA license is not currently OSI-accepted,
it combines acceptable elements of two other OSI-accepted licenses.

There are currently at least 4 variations of the MIT license on OSI's accepted
list: MIT, BSD, Apache, X.com. I don't want to suggest that NCSA petition OSI
to accept yet another variation. While OSI and friends have given up on the
prospect of generating a unified Open Source license, it appears that it would
at least be possible for OSI and the community to drive unification of the MIT
variants into a single license with two optional portions: the
generally-deprecated advertising clause used by Apache, and the
choice-of-jurisdiction used by X.com .

	Thanks

	Bruce Perens
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