Hi, Bill,

I am not a lawyer, but this license has two drawbacks:

1) It’s pure existence aids license proliferation, which is a bad thing by itself.

2) Gluing the Soundcloud link to the software “forever” is a bad thing (especially as it is for any URL which is not really forever under your control.[1])

No one knows what content will be hosted on that domain in the future. E. G. Soundcloud may go bankrupt, or be assimilated by another company, or just change their name for whatever reason.

My employer had some dependency on some third party library, and the original project ceased to exist after some years, but the license still required a link to the given URL for the homepage of the project. Currently, that link points to some “harmless” domain grabber site.

But our lawyer still advised us to replace that library with something else, as the URL might point to different contents in the future. This could cause quite some trouble, as it is illegal in some jurisdictions to spread links to certain kinds of illegal contents (imagine someone buying the domain and hosting a child porn trading site there, and your curious customers follow that link…)

(On the other hand, if you actually control the content on the URL, you yourself could put illegal content there, causing trouble for your users, thus one could argue that the license is not really irrevocable anymore.)

Thus, I’m not even sure if it meets the OSI requirements, DFSG guidelines etc..

TL’DR: Requiring a link in your license poses a great risk for your users, and might actually render distribution of your software illegal any time in the future

[1] I assume here you’re not the owner of Soundcloud.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Best regards

Markus Schaber

CODESYS Group
We software Automation.

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Von: Spdx-legal@... <Spdx-legal@...> Im Auftrag von Bill Granfield
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 17. Januar 2019 18:31
An: spdx-legal@...
Betreff: New License/Exception Request: Link To My SoundCloud Public License