[License-review] Request for Legacy Approval: Unicode Data Files and Software License

[Richard Fontana]

Hi,

I notice the SPDX group have identifiers for two Unicode licenses:
https://spdx.org/licenses/Unicode-DFS-2016.html
https://spdx.org/licenses/Unicode-DFS-2015.html

At least one difference between those two is that the 2015 license has
a condition "(c) there is clear notice in each modified Data File or
in the Software as well as in the documentation associated with the
Data File(s) or Software that the data or software has been modified."
which is not in the 2016 license. The currently published license
which you have referenced may be identical to Unicode-DFS-2016 but I
have not actually checked this.

Assuming there are just two such licenses, do you see a value in
legacy approval for the one version but not the other?

Richard


On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 4:22 AM, Sascha Brawer <sascha at brawer.ch> wrote:
> Type of submission: Request for Legacy Approval
> License name: Unicode Data Files and Software License
> License URL: http://www.unicode.org/copyright.html#LICENSE
>
> Background information: The Unicode license is applied to data files and
> software from Unicode.org. Since the mid 1990s, probably every computer
> system in existence has been including Unicode data files. In addition to
> the Unicode character database, the license is also applied to the source
> code of the ICU internationalization library [icu-project.org], to data from
> Unicode CLDR [cldr.unicode.org], and to other Unicode projects such as data
> collection tools and test suites. However, at least to our knowledge, nobody
> outside Unicode.org has adopted this license for their own projects. At some
> point in the future, Unicode might retire this license and switch to one of
> the more popular open-source licenses such as BSD or MIT; however, this will
> need discussion among Unicode members, so any license change/retirement
> might take a long time. In the meantime, we’d like to request Legacy
> Approval from opensource.org.
>
> Proposed entry in https://opensource.org/proliferation-report:
> File under “Licenses that are redundant with more popular licenses”.
> Probably it is redundant with BSD or MIT — thanks for helping with the exact
> classification here. Or, alternatively, perhaps it could be filed under
> “Special purpose licenses” (only suitable for data and software from
> Unicode.org).
>
> Thanks, and best regards,
>
> — Sascha
>
>
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