[License-discuss] BSD, MIT [was Re: Draft of new OSI licenses landing page; please review.]

[Jeremy C. Reed]

(responding to two different emails...)

> Even if the rest of Karl's proposal does not go through, and nothing
> else changes with the license list pages, I'd be perfectly happy
> moving BSD and MIT to the redundant or superseded lists.

On Thu, 5 Apr 2012, Luis Villa wrote:

> But I think they should no longer be part of the category of licenses
> labeled "if you were to start a new project from scratch, you should
> probably use one of these" - which I think is what Karl is aiming at
> here, and what our current page may well be read to imply even if not
> changed.

"Superseded" should not imply that the projects that actively use them 
have dropped them because they are inferior or replaced with a newer or 
different license. They may have been superseded by you, but generally 
they are not by the existing developers (copyright owners).

Not speaking for my employer (who makes one of the most used softwares), 
but I do agree with their opinion on this ... when we started a new 
software project from scratch, we purposely chose to use a MIT/BSD style 
of license. And we make sure our dependencies match up with the same 
goals and simplicity.

In addition, some significant software collections continue to require 
or highly suggest that new from scratch projects use the BSD/MIT style 
license (even if they are standalone and won't cause tainting of other 
code in the suite.)

Also regarding "superseded" what features should be changed or added? 
Note that the even the Open Source Definition doesn't include many of 
the longer/newer license features.

Changing topic some ... have there been any precedents related to the 
terms/conditions not included in the MIT/BSD style licenses?

It would be interesting to provide references to case records / court 
opinions related to each criteria in the Open Source Definition and then 
expand on that for each point in some other licenses like Apache 2, GPL 
2, GPL 3, etc.  (Has anyone done this research?)