[License-discuss] Blue Oak Model License 1.0.0

[Thorsten Glaser]

Hi everyone,

it hasn’t popped up here or on l-r, but my girlfriend found
https://blueoakcouncil.org/2019/03/06/model.html which links
to https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0 for a new licence.

Posting here because it hasn’t been submitted for review yet,
so we can discuss, if someone is interested, but mostly so my
and apotheon’s points are publicly archived so we can point
others to it. He agreed with me trying to summarise our short
discussion.

I’ve looked it over and discussed it a bit with apotheon (the
Copyfree founder) in IRC, and we found it most likely free,
but unnecessary and a bit disturbing:

• it’s only for software, not for works in general, which is
  a step back from MirOS (my personal reference point)

• it’s *extremely* vague, which might suffice, but hasn’t been
  tested in court or anything

• it explicitly licences software patents, which is a modern
  thing to do… it’s a hard topic for me, but I currently prefer
  an explicit licence to use and sell (and make, I suppose) being
  treated as implicit patent licence, because with explicit ones,
  it’s hard-to-impossible to licence external contributions under
  these terms; on the flip side, the patent licence is worded
  somewhat well as it licences “any patent claims they can license
  or become able to license”

• it looks like it has been written without a lawyer involved at
  all, not even looking it over after the fact, “You must not do
  anything with this software that triggers a rule that you cannot
  or will not follow.” really looks like “hackers” trying to be
  too smart for me (but IANAL, so I wouldn’t know)

• the “No Liability” rule is for the USA again, not for the EU,
  which is probably justified given that they are located there,
  but its vague text might (with a low chance, I hope) be inter‐
  preted wrongly

• I don’t like the version number… three period-separated digits
  is a tad too much ☻

• I think it’s probably OSD-conformant, DFSG-free and Ⓕ Copyfree,
  and apotheon agrees on the latter but states that it’s a very
  unnecessary licence, “I'm kinda disappointed that it exists,
  but maybe it'll serve to stand in the way of other, non-copyfree
  licenses with similarly bad form.”

• We also both found the reference to linking to that web page in
  particular problematic (“At some point in the future, that page
  may well disappear, or become something else, or have a "refined"
  form of the license terms that is non-copyfree”), but as handing
  out the complete text of the licence is also allowed it’s a minor
  point for me personally (I’ll personally just treat any links to
  that page as if they embedded the original text I just saved to
  the wayback machine¹); the formatting is bad (it looks like the
  full stop at the end of the sentence is part of the link) though

• I’m a bit miffed with it licencing _all_ rights under copyright,
  which
  – apotheon points out often can’t be licensed (and they did not
    use the aforementioned good wording from the patent licence for
    the copyright licence part)
  – licences out the moral rights for Europeans which might be in‐
    terpreted as waiving the right to complain e.g. if the work or
    author are defaced or something, and is different between
    countries

All in all, I think it’s a licence I’d accept for incoming but never
use, especially as it has points that are detrimental for Europeans,
some explicit (last bullet point), some by means of being too vague
(such as what passes for disclaimer).

Perhaps more universally, I’d not use it because it’s too vague and
too limited compared to the better-established permissive licences
(BSD, MIT, MirOS).

① http://web.archive.org/web/20190729172943/https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0

Opening up the discussion for those so inclined,
//mirabilos
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