[License-discuss] Advice for submitting a new license

[Rob Landley]

On 8/7/26 06:39, AMOGUSForever via License-discuss wrote:
> Hello, i wanted to submit a license for license review called UPD
> I have tried to submit the review directly to OSI license review list but got rejected by the moderator saying that i should look at
> https://opensource.org/licenses/review-process.
> However i do not see any issues about my review and didn't got any other advice from the moderator.
> (in case you want to check its attached to the email)
> 
> Please post any possible improvement for both review text (to resubmit)
> and the license text itself so that it gets ready for license review.

Public domain equivalent licenses are a category:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-domain-equivalent_license

My entry in that category (a dozen years ago) was "Zero Clause BSD" 
(BSD0) which I got approved by SPDX a few months before somebody else 
submitted it here under a different name and caused various headaches. I 
walked it through the github choose-a-license approval process in 2018 
and it's in reasonably widespread use:

https://github.com/search?q=license%3A0bsd&type=Repositories&ref=advsearch&l=&l=

If done properly (my understanding is) public domain equivalent licenses 
are the only license type that's fungible, so you can pull in code from 
multiple differently public domain equivalent licensed sources without 
"the stuttering problem" of having to list multiple licenses on your 
codebase (and then having your source control history supoenaed to see 
what license applies to what lines of code if you ever wind up having it 
enforced). This is because this license category does NOT require you to 
copy the license text into derived works, but just grants permissions 
(and optionally disclaims liability).

That means, if there's a public domain equivalent license in use not 
just by open source developers but by google, microsoft, and facebook 
(all of which not just ship but author software under 0BSD)... could you 
explain why you're doing another one?

Rob