[License-review] Request for Legacy Approval for the ICU License (as used by ICU 1.8.1 to ICU 57.1)

[Richard Fontana]

On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 12:47 PM Jeff Johnson <trnsz at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> I'm requesting that the ICU License be considered for Legacy approval as an OSI-approved license.
>
> Rationale:
>
> The ICU License is used by the extremely popular decNumber library (https://speleotrove.com/decimal/), which is dual-licensed (with the other option being GPL - https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/tree/master/libdecnumber).  The DPS8M simulator program is using the ICU License.  There are other major programs that redistribute ICU-licensed code such as Bloomberg COMDB2, IBM NetREXX, etc.
>
> Currently, Debian and Red Hat allow this license. Red Hat via Fedora considers it a variant of the MIT License.  See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:MIT#Modern_style_(ICU_Variant).

FWIW Fedora now classifies this license under the SPDX identifier
'ICU' with the migration away from the Callaway system [1] :
https://gitlab.com/fedora/legal/fedora-license-data/-/blob/main/data/ICU.toml

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callaway_system