[License-discuss] License licenses

[Bruce Perens]

License texts are functional, and I would have assumed that they are not
subject to copyright. No doubt we have cases from boilerplate form
producers as precedent.

Thanks

Bruce

On Fri, May 31, 2019, 13:45 Smith, McCoy <mccoy.smith at intel.com> wrote:

> >>-----Original Message-----
> >>From: License-discuss [mailto:
> license-discuss-bounces at lists.opensource.org] On Behalf Of Richard Fontana
> >>Sent: Friday, May 31, 2019 11:08 AM
> >>To: masson at opensource.org; license-discuss at lists.opensource.org
> >>Subject: Re: [License-discuss] License licenses
>
> >>For example, for the MIT license:
>
> >>(1) No submitter -- the MIT license was grandfathered in by the original
> OSI board
> >>(2) No nominal copyright owner
> >>(3) Despite its name, MIT does not appear to have authored the MIT
> license, based on the historical research I've done -- somewhat important
> because in later times I believe the MIT tech transfer office itself
> assumed -- based on the name popularized by the OSI itself -- that it had
> authored the MIT license, and also more recently some of the members of the
> "open source licenses can be copyright only" camp wish to argue that the
> MIT license should be read as a "copyright only" license because the
> present-day MIT tech transfer office supposedly takes that view. MIT is not
> the license steward of the MIT license -- there is no license steward --
> which is separate from but closely related to the authorship and copyright
> ownership issue.
>
> Here's some MIT license archeology:
> https://opensource.com/article/19/4/history-mit-license
>
> Be interesting to see one on BSD too, although I didn't see a similar one
> using some quick web inquiries.
>
> _______________________________________________
> License-discuss mailing list
> License-discuss at lists.opensource.org
>
> http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20190531/72fe8bf1/attachment.html>