[License-review] Please rename "Free Public License-1.0.0" to 0BSD.

Smith, McCoy mccoy.smith at intel.com
Wed Oct 17 16:36:31 UTC 2018


I'll second Richard's comment.  ISC is textually quite different than BSD, and to my mind is more similar to MIT in its construction (although it has potentially substantive differences with MIT also).  Those of us (mostly lawyers) who parse these licenses for a living often have debates about these textual differences may impact the rights granted or not granted and the way a court might ultimately interpret them.
As one example, BSD uses the noun "conditions" whereas ISC and MIT use "permission."  That might seem like an inconsequential difference, but it could result in a differing interpretation of how these licenses work if it ever got in front of a court.  As another example, BSD also specifies different conditions for source vs. binary distributions, whereas ISC and MIT do not.

-----Original Message-----
From: License-review [mailto:license-review-bounces at lists.opensource.org] On Behalf Of Richard Fontana
Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2018 6:56 AM
To: Josh Berkus <josh at berkus.org>
Cc: License submissions for OSI review <license-review at lists.opensource.org>
Subject: Re: [License-review] Please rename "Free Public License-1.0.0" to 0BSD.

On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 01:03:07PM +0200, Josh Berkus wrote:
> On 10/16/2018 10:36 PM, Rob Landley wrote:

> >> It was a 2 clause OpenBSD license linked as "License Template" from 
> >> the top of http://www.openbsd.org/policy.html with half a sentence 
> >> removed (ala https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/ee86b1d8e25c).
> > 
> > Here is where I got the license text from, off of OpenBSD's website:
> > 
> > https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/share/misc/license.template?rev=HEAD
> 
> Ah, OK. I was going off Richard's statement that it was derived from 
> ISC and had no textual relationship to the BSD license.  If it has a 
> textual relationship, then I withdraw my objection.

It does not have a textual relationship to the BSD license (at least beyond what I'd consider paraphrase). It's the ISC license. At some point OpenBSD recommended use of the ISC license.

Richard


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