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46Message-Id: <201810171801.w9HI1egQ039009@chez.mckusick.com>
47From: Kirk McKusick <mckusick@mckusick.com>
48To: Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
49Subject: Re: License naming question.
50X-URL: http://WWW.McKusick.COM/
51Reply-To: Kirk McKusick <mckusick@mckusick.com>
52In-reply-to: <9bf40da7-afb3-d3d6-3759-d1566c99aa20@landley.net>
53Comments: In-reply-to Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
54   message dated "Tue, 16 Oct 2018 17:57:10 -0500."
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59Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2018 11:01:40 -0700
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63
64> To: mckusick@mckusick.com
65> From: Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
66> Subject: License naming question.
67> Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2018 17:57:10 -0500
68> =
69
70> Hi,
71> =
72
73> We spoke at Ohio Linuxfest back in 2013 (you attended my Rise and
74> Fall of Copyleft talk, and then we talked in the hallway afterwards).
75> =
76
77> I _think_ I told you about my plans to try to promote public domain
78> equivalent licensing, a concept which has a wikipedia page now:
79> =
80
81> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_equivalent_license
82> =
83
84> For toybox what I did was take the OpenBSD suggested template license
85> off their website and remove the half-sentence requiring people to
86> copy that specific license text into derived works, and the resulting
87> license made it past Google's lawyers! My toybox project has been
88> providing the command line for android since Marshmallow
89> (https://lwn.net/Articles/629362/) and we're making progress on
90> getting android to build under android, the Bionic libc maintainer
91> recently sent me a roadmap update about that:
92> =
93
94> https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/92b359f00057
95> =
96
97> I called the resulting license "Zero Clause BSD" (by analogy with
98> "Creative Commons Zero" and the existing 4 clause, 3 clause, and 2
99> clause BSD licenses), and I even got SPDX approval for it in 2015
100> (because Samsung asked me to shortly after Google merged it into
101> AOSP, they'd been adding it aftermarket before then and having an
102> SPDX identifier for the license simplified their internal bureaucracy).
103> =
104
105> Then a couple months after SPDX approved it, somebody _else_ submitted
106> the same license to Eric Raymond's old Open Source Initiative using
107> "Free" in the name, as in Free Software Foundation. (A sadly loaded
108> term these days.)
109> =
110
111> I hadn't known they were still in the license approval business
112> (they stopped approving new licenses in... 2012? And I remember
113> them explicitly _rejecting_ CC0 saying public domain isn't a license,
114> which their FAQ still talks about at
115> https://opensource.org/faq#public-domain). But they approved the
116> toybox license under a different name, then asked SPDX to retroactively
117> change their name for it. (SPDX didn't, but OSI refused to admit
118> it made a mistake, even though they said they had a policy to keep
119> the names in sync. They hadn't done their homework.)
120> =
121
122> Now every time the license is considered for a new use, the confusion
123> OSI caused tends to derail things:
124> =
125
126> https://github.com/david-a-wheeler/spdx-tutorial/issues/1
127> =
128
129> When github itself was considering adding 0BSD to its license
130> pulldown (which would have been a big win), I was asked what I
131> thought of the naming confusion, and I wrote two long things on my
132> rationale with lots of links to earlier stuff, which you can read
133> here if you'd like:
134> =
135
136> https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/issues/464
137> =
138
139> Anyway, I recently decided to ask OSI to admit they made a mistake
140> and change their name for the license to match what SPDX did, and
141> there was unanimous approval...
142> =
143
144> http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.or=
145g/2018-September/003519.html
146> =
147
148> Until the same guy who was objecting last time showed up to continue
149> to object.  He ignord the "who used it first" axis, and said he
150> wanted to know which  name was used more today, and then when he
151> lost that argument he said he objects to calling something a BSD
152> license that isn't using Berkeley's original wording.
153> =
154
155> My question is: do you object to the name "Zero Clause BSD" for a
156> public domain equivalent license that's the OpenBSD suggested
157> template license with half a sentence removed?
158> =
159
160> If you want to stay out of this, I understand. I'm pretty sure I
161> asked you this in 2013 before I started pushing the name, and
162> wouldn't have if you'd objected then, but that was long ago and the
163> water under the bridge is dead...
164> =
165
166> Thanks for your time, sorry that took so long to explain. (And even
167> longer if you read the big long github choosealicense thread. :)
168> =
169
170> Rob
171
172Thanks for the through explanation of the situation.
173
174I have no objections to the name "Zero Clause BSD" for your license.
175
176I hope that you are successful in getting OSI to change their name
177for the license to match what SPDX did.
178
179	Kirk McKusick
180
181