Communication skills

[Chuck Swiger]

On Nov 15, 2007, at 11:36 AM, Chris Travers wrote:
> On Nov 15, 2007 11:27 AM, Zak Greant <zak.greant at gmail.com> wrote:
>> FreeBSD has used more than one license in it's history (IIRC) and its
>> various components are not all coherently licensed.
>
> Ok so what do you do when someone asks whether the FreeBSD License is
> OSI approved?

We might tell them that the FreeBSD project primarily uses software  
under 2-clause, 3-clause, and 4-clause BSD-style licenses, along with  
a smattering of GPL, ZLib, and MIT/X11 licensed code.

Right now, all of the above licenses except the 2-clause variant are  
OSI approved.

> Do you object to Russ's proposal as well?

I would give it a -1.

>> Choosing the name, "Simplified BSD License" provides a relatively
>> clear description of what the license is - assuming that the audience
>> knows what the BSD license is.
>>
> But it still leads to community confusion.  At very least, we need an
> acknowledgement that this license is sometimes called the FreeBSD
> License.

It is?  By whom?

There are zero matches for that phrase on the FreeBSD Website, in the  
FreeBSD documentation tree, or in the mailing list archives for <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org 
 >:

   http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/search.cgi?max=25&source=www&words=FreeBSD+License&submit=Search

"Nothing found."

% grep -r "FreeBSD License" /usr/doc || echo "no matches"
no matches

   http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/mmsearch/freebsd-questions

"No matches were found for 'freebsd and (license or licence or  
licensed or licensing or licenser or licenses)'"

About the closest match is here:

   http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/

...which links to:

   http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.html

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck