[License-review] Amazon FreeRTOS - new license or not?

Kate Stewart kstewart at linuxfoundation.org
Thu Nov 30 01:02:08 UTC 2017


Hi,
    Today Amazon relicensed FreeRTOS from GPLv2 to "MIT"[1].

However they didn't quite use the standard OSI MIT text. [2] instead they
used:

FreeRTOS Kernel V10.0.0+ * Copyright (C) 2017 Amazon.com, Inc. or its
affiliates.  All Rights Reserved.+ *+ * Permission is hereby granted,
free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of+ * this software and
associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in+ * the
Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to+ * use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
and/or sell copies of+ * the Software, and to permit persons to whom
the Software is furnished to do so,+ * subject to the following
conditions:+ *+ * The above copyright notice and this permission
notice shall be included in all+ * copies or substantial portions of
the Software. If you wish to use our Amazon+ * FreeRTOS name, please
do so in a fair use way that does not cause confusion.+ *+ * THE
SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS
OR+ * IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS+ * FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR+ * COPYRIGHT HOLDERS
BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER+ * IN AN
ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN+ *
CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.



The phrase "If you wish to use our Amazon FreeRTOS name, please do so in a
fair use way that does not cause confusion".
is an extra condition.

For those creating license scanners,  should the change be considered
substantive enough to warrant a new license,
or should it be recognized as  OSI's "MIT"?

Since FreeRTOS is so pervasive in the embedded world,  we'll likely need to
address this in SPDX license list if it
warrants a new license identifier.

Thoughts?

Kate

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/freertos/code/2519/#diff-1
[2] https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
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