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New OSI-approved licenses

Richard Fontana <fontana@...> #1282 Greetings spdx-legal, The OSI recently approved three licenses as Open Source: 1) eCos License version 2.0 (under the 'Legacy Approval' process) Text of approved license contained within: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2014-August/000853.html Note that the interesting part of this license is identical to http://spdx.org/licenses/eCos-exception-2.0.html#licenseExceptionText 2) Free Public License 1.0.0 Text of approved license contained within: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2015-August/001104.html 3) OSET Foundation Public License version 2.1 We don't quite have a canonical license document here yet (the license that was approved was a conceptually-typo-corrected version of a redline document). Anyway I would like to request the SPDX group consider creating license names and identifiers for these. If this is a chicken-and-egg problem (i.e. if the OSI needs to officially post these license texts on its website before the SPDX group will consider such a request) let me know. Also I am curious whether the SPDX group considers this necessary for the case of the eCos License given the existence of a name and identifier for the exception portion. Thanks, Richard
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J Lovejoy #1283 Hi Richard, Thanks for sending this! Kate and I were just talking about how we needed to create some kind of process to make sure that we add any new OSI approved licenses to the SPDX License List and coordinate on the short identifiers. In any case, it would be great to use this opportunity to establish an outline of a process that will work for OSI and SPDX that we can use and reference going forward. I”m happy to put something up on a wiki page that we can all view and edit, if that’s helpful. In the meantime, comments regarding the specific license in-line, and some other thoughts below: SPDX Legal Team co-lead opensource@... On Nov 16, 2015, at 9:03 AM, Richard Fontana <fontana@...> wrote: Greetings spdx-legal, The OSI recently approved three licenses as Open Source: 1) eCos License version 2.0 (under the 'Legacy Approval' process) Text of approved license contained within: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2014-August/000853.html Note that the interesting part of this license is identical to http://spdx.org/licenses/eCos-exception-2.0.html#licenseExceptionText The short identifier is already defined for SPDX using the “with” operator and the exception identifier. It would be: GPL-2.0+ WITH eCos-exception-2.0 Unless anyone thinks otherwise, I would think that license expression could be noted on the OSI site in the same way the other SPDX identifiers are?? This does raise for us the question as to whether we need to add an “OSI Approved” column to the exceptions list. To my knowledge, this is the only GPL exception that has been specifically approved by OSI, is that right? 2) Free Public License 1.0.0 Text of approved license contained within: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2015-August/001104.html We have added as of v2.2 - http://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html - although it was submitted using a different name as suggested by the submitter (who I think said he authored the license… or at least seemed to know a lot about it’s origins and the suggested name, which we went with - see http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-June/001443.html for that thread). Would the OSI oppose the name we already went with?? 3) OSET Foundation Public License version 2.1 We don't quite have a canonical license document here yet (the license that was approved was a conceptually-typo-corrected version of a redline document). Great - we’ll need the license text - do you want to just let us know when you have the final version? Anyway I would like to request the SPDX group consider creating license names and identifiers for these. If this is a chicken-and-egg problem (i.e. if the OSI needs to officially post these license texts on its website before the SPDX group will consider such a request) let me know. I think the best order of things would be roughly what you have done: a heads up that the OSI is about to approve a new license before it’s posted, as this would give us a chance to come up with a full name and short identifier, which we are happy to have OSI input on. That way, when OSI posts it, you can include the SPDX short identifier (in brackets and in the URL, which I believe is what has been done). Since we are releasing a new license list on a quarterly basis and depending on how quick your web team is, it may be that the license appears on the OSI site first, vice versa, or it might happen that it’s around the same time frame on both sites - in any case, our on-going list of license to be added would reflect that a license will be added on the next release, so I don’t think any lag in either direction matters much. Let me know if you have other thoughts on that (or anyone else on the list here). Thanks! Jilayne
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Richard Fontana <fontana@...> #1285 On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 10:24:34PM -0700, J Lovejoy wrote: The OSI recently approved three licenses as Open Source: 1) eCos License version 2.0 (under the 'Legacy Approval' process) Text of approved license contained within: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2014-August/000853.html Note that the interesting part of this license is identical to http://spdx.org/licenses/eCos-exception-2.0.html#licenseExceptionText The short identifier is already defined for SPDX using the “with” operator and the exception identifier. It would be: GPL-2.0+ WITH eCos-exception-2.0 Ah, okay. That makes sense. The only issue is that for some time there has been a desire for the URLs for licenses on the OSI website to match the SPDX short identifier. I think we will probably use 'eCos' for the URL rather than 'GPL-2.0+ WITH eCos-exception-2.0' and to that extent we will have to change the current practice of honoring the SPDX identifiers. Unless anyone thinks otherwise, I would think that license expression could be noted on the OSI site in the same way the other SPDX identifiers are?? I believe what's currently done is that the SPDX identifier is used in two contexts, in the general list of OSI-approved licenses and in the URLs. I don't see a problem with using 'GPL-2.0+ WITH eCos-exception-2.0' in the list but as noted I think it would be problematic to use it in the URL. This does raise for us the question as to whether we need to add an “OSI Approved” column to the exceptions list. To my knowledge, this is the only GPL exception that has been specifically approved by OSI, is that right? There is one other, the wxWindows Library License: http://opensource.org/licenses/WXwindows Not to mention LGPL version 3. 2) Free Public License 1.0.0 Text of approved license contained within: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2015-August/001104.html We have added as of v2.2 - http://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html - although it was submitted using a different name as suggested by the submitter (who I think said he authored the license… or at least seemed to know a lot about it’s origins and the suggested name, which we went with - see http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-June/001443.html for that thread). Would the OSI oppose the name we already went with?? Hmm, I think this is really a case of two people independently inventing approximately the same thing at about the same time, where 'invention' means removing some language from an existing short license. The one possible textual difference is that the Free Public License does not normatively contain a copyright notice (at least, in the discussion on the license-review list, it seemed to be assumed that the license would be used without a copyright notice, and no actual or template copyright notice was part of the text submitted by the license submitter). I can't see OSI wanting to identify this as '0BSD', in part because it is not actually based directly on the BSD license contrary to what Rob Landley seemed to be saying. I mean, I personally would be opposed to OSI referring to this as '0BSD' because I think it can only possibly be confusing. And this license is actually a relatively important one as it fills a significant gap in the policy range of OSI-approved licenses. So with all respect to Mr. Landley I would like to ask the SPDX group to consider changing '0BSD' to 'FPL' (if that's available) or else something closer to 'Free Public License'. (From the SPDX perspective, I gather the presence or absence of the copyright notice at the top does not affect whether it is treated as the same license? Unlike the current situation with the BSD or MIT or ISC licenses, when the Free Public License is published on the OSI website there will not be a template copyright notice.) 3) OSET Foundation Public License version 2.1 We don't quite have a canonical license document here yet (the license that was approved was a conceptually-typo-corrected version of a redline document). Great - we’ll need the license text - do you want to just let us know when you have the final version? Sure, I'll have that ready soon. Thanks, Richard
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Richard Fontana <fontana@...> #1286 On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 01:32:44AM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote: 2) Free Public License 1.0.0 Text of approved license contained within: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2015-August/001104.html We have added as of v2.2 - http://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html - although it was submitted using a different name as suggested by the submitter (who I think said he authored the license… or at least seemed to know a lot about it’s origins and the suggested name, which we went with - see http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-June/001443.html for that thread). Would the OSI oppose the name we already went with?? Hmm, I think this is really a case of two people independently inventing approximately the same thing at about the same time, where 'invention' means removing some language from an existing short license. Looks like Rob Landley was using it a year or more earlier: https://lwn.net/Articles/608082/ Decided to copy in Rob Landley here. Rob: the license contained herein https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2015-August/001104.html was recently approved by the Open Source Initiative under the name 'Free Public License 1.0.0', and it has only now come to light (for me, or anyone associated with the OSI) that you have been using an essentially identical license (apart from presence/absence of an initial copyright notice) which you call 'Zero Clause BSD'. Richard
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Rob Landley <rob@...> #1287 On 11/17/2015 12:51 AM, Richard Fontana wrote: On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 01:32:44AM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote: 2) Free Public License 1.0.0 Text of approved license contained within: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2015-August/001104.html We have added as of v2.2 - http://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html - although it was submitted using a different name as suggested by the submitter (who I think said he authored the license… or at least seemed to know a lot about it’s origins and the suggested name, which we went with - see http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-June/001443.html for that thread). Would the OSI oppose the name we already went with?? Hmm, I think this is really a case of two people independently inventing approximately the same thing at about the same time, where 'invention' means removing some language from an existing short license. Looks like Rob Landley was using it a year or more earlier: https://lwn.net/Articles/608082/ Decided to copy in Rob Landley here. Rob: the license contained herein https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2015-August/001104.html was recently approved by the Open Source Initiative under the name 'Free Public License 1.0.0', and it has only now come to light (for me, or anyone associated with the OSI) that you have been using an essentially identical license (apart from presence/absence of an initial copyright notice) which you call 'Zero Clause BSD'. I intend to keep using the name "Zero Clause BSD" because it's the OpenBSD suggested template license with half a sentence removed. This suggested template is linked from the first paragraph of: http://www.openbsd.org/policy.html According to that page the provenance if the license is actually an ISC derivative, but since it's OpenBSD's license calling it a "BSD license" seems justified. The name I chose backs up the message "this is a BSD license, only very slightly modified (only by removing text, not adding any)." The zero also implies a similarity to creative commons zero, the public domain variant of creative commons (which it is of course compatible with). There are several existing public domain licenses, such as unlicense.org. The advantage of BSD0 is that legal departments familiar with "BSD licensed code" don't have to go through the full approval process for a new license. If they're comfortable with BSD licensing, this should be an easy sell, it's a minor variant of the existing OpenBSD license template, just with half a sentence removed. Calling it a "Free" license implies the Free Software Foundation is involved (the old "free software" vs "open source" debate). The FSF is on the pro-copyleft side of things, where zero clause bsd is "more BSD than BSD" by being public domain. These diverge from BSD in opposite directions, so the word "free" is actively misleading in this context, warning legal departments to be wary instead of putting them at ease by highlighting the similarity with OpenBSD's template as I'm trying to do. I prefer the name that implies "this is a BSD license that acts like Creative Commons Zero". Calling it "free" anything implies "The Free Software Foundation is involved, be prepared to put up a fight", which seems counterproductive. Richard Rob
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Rob Landley <rob@...> #1293 Did this ever get resolved? On 11/17/2015 12:51 AM, Richard Fontana wrote: On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 01:32:44AM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote: 2) Free Public License 1.0.0 Text of approved license contained within: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2015-August/001104.html We have added as of v2.2 - http://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html - although it was submitted using a different name as suggested by the submitter (who I think said he authored the license… or at least seemed to know a lot about it’s origins and the suggested name, which we went with - see http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-June/001443.html for that thread). Would the OSI oppose the name we already went with?? Hmm, I think this is really a case of two people independently inventing approximately the same thing at about the same time, Given the timeline, it's more likely they copied the license from Android. March 2013: I start using this license: http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2013-March/000794.html November 2014: Android merges toybox to replace toolbox: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=76861#c11 January 2015: Linux Weekly News covers toybox's addition to Android: https://lwn.net/Articles/629362/ May 2015: Android-M preview containing toybox distributed to developers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Marshmallow June 2015: Either Samsung or Sony (I forget which) asks me to submit the the toybox license to SPDX to simplify their internal paperwork: http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-June/001443.html August 30, 2015: These guys submit the license to OSI. https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2015-August/001104.html I didn't submit my public domain equivalent license to OSI because their lawyer wrote an article literally comparing public domain software to abandoning trash by the side of a highway (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6225 paragraph 5), and if you google for "Linux Public Domain" it's still the second hit. where 'invention' means removing some language from an existing short license. Yes, it is a minor variant of an existing BSD license. Specifically, the OpenBSD template license (http://www.openbsd.org/policy.html links to http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/share/misc/license.template?rev=HEAD) which is why I felt justified in calling it a BSD license. There were already "2 clause", "3 clause", and "4 clause" BSD licenses commonly referred to, "zero clause" to mean public domain didn't seem like a stretch (and is also what the Creative Commons guys chose with CC0). It also makes it easy for corporate legal departments that have approved existing BSD licenses to rubber-stamp another. I chose this name for a reason. In the "copyleft vs bsd" axis, this is more BSD than BSD. "Free" is the Free Software Foundation's rallying cry (and the reason OSI had to come up with "Open Source" to counter "Free Software"). Sticking the word "Free" on a public domain equivalent license (as far from copyleft as you can get) is either intentionally confusing or deeply clueless. Part of my attraction to public domain licensing is trying to counteract the damage GPLv3 did to the community at large when it fragmented copyleft into incompatible factions. There's no such thing as "The GPL" anymore, Linux and Samba implement two ends of the same protocol, are both GPL, and neither can use the other's code. Copyleft is now a significant _barrier_ to code reuse within copylefted projects. The result seems to be a generation of programmers who are lumping software copyrights in with software patents as "too dumb to live", and taking a napster-style civil disobedience approach, opting out of licensing their code at ALL until the whole corrupt intellectual property edifice collapses under its own weight. "No License Specified" continues to be the most common license on github _after_ its CEO made a big push to standardize on MIT licensing as a default. The percentage has gone _up_ in the past year: https://speakerdeck.com/benbalter/open-source-licensing-by-the-numbers?slide=41 If I just wanted a public domain license I could have grabbed creative commons zero (or the libtomcrypt license or unlicense.org or...) but I wanted the strategic advantage of the name "Zero Clause BSD" because the ability to say "we're more BSD than BSD" is an easy sell that short-circuits a lot of explanation. Attaching the Free Software Foundation's codeword "Free" to a non-copyleft license is... odd. Saying "when we use the word 'Free' we mean something different than when the Free Software Foundation uses the word 'Free'" is not an argument I want to make, especially not to people who have developed an _aversion_ to copyleft. Looks like Rob Landley was using it a year or more earlier: https://lwn.net/Articles/608082/ According to http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/264b9da809df since March 14, 2013, so 2 and a half years earlier than August 30 of this year. Checking my old email, I noticed 0BSD marked approved for 2.2 in your public spreadsheet July 19, 2015, so you'd already approved it a month and a half before the other guy submitted it to OSI. I'm guessing what happened here is that Android's "about->licenses" thing gives license text but not license names, so they made one up. Rob
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Richard Fontana <fontana@...> #1294 Not really. I respect your desire to keep the name of the license you've been using and appreciate your policy objections to the name of the Free Public License; however I have no inclination to ask the OSI to change the name of the approved license (which seems to differ from 0BSD in one respect, namely the normative non-inclusion of a template copyright notice). I think then, if we assume that 0BSD and the Free Public License are really the same license from the SPDX world view standpoint, that this may unfortunately be the first departure from the trend of OSI endorsing the use of SPDX short names (I think the one for the recently-approved eCos license is a little problematic too). I encourage the SPDX group to consider coming up with a new short name for the Free Public License without altering the status of 0BSD. - RF toggle quoted message Show quoted text On Fri, Dec 04, 2015 at 07:37:55PM -0600, Rob Landley wrote: Did this ever get resolved? On 11/17/2015 12:51 AM, Richard Fontana wrote: On Tue, Nov 17, 2015 at 01:32:44AM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote: 2) Free Public License 1.0.0 Text of approved license contained within: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2015-August/001104.html We have added as of v2.2 - http://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html - although it was submitted using a different name as suggested by the submitter (who I think said he authored the license… or at least seemed to know a lot about it’s origins and the suggested name, which we went with - see http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-June/001443.html for that thread). Would the OSI oppose the name we already went with?? Hmm, I think this is really a case of two people independently inventing approximately the same thing at about the same time, Given the timeline, it's more likely they copied the license from Android. March 2013: I start using this license: http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2013-March/000794.html November 2014: Android merges toybox to replace toolbox: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=76861#c11 January 2015: Linux Weekly News covers toybox's addition to Android: https://lwn.net/Articles/629362/ May 2015: Android-M preview containing toybox distributed to developers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Marshmallow June 2015: Either Samsung or Sony (I forget which) asks me to submit the the toybox license to SPDX to simplify their internal paperwork: http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-June/001443.html August 30, 2015: These guys submit the license to OSI. https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review/2015-August/001104.html I didn't submit my public domain equivalent license to OSI because their lawyer wrote an article literally comparing public domain software to abandoning trash by the side of a highway (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6225 paragraph 5), and if you google for "Linux Public Domain" it's still the second hit. where 'invention' means removing some language from an existing short license. Yes, it is a minor variant of an existing BSD license. Specifically, the OpenBSD template license (http://www.openbsd.org/policy.html links to http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/share/misc/license.template?rev=HEAD) which is why I felt justified in calling it a BSD license. There were already "2 clause", "3 clause", and "4 clause" BSD licenses commonly referred to, "zero clause" to mean public domain didn't seem like a stretch (and is also what the Creative Commons guys chose with CC0). It also makes it easy for corporate legal departments that have approved existing BSD licenses to rubber-stamp another. I chose this name for a reason. In the "copyleft vs bsd" axis, this is more BSD than BSD. "Free" is the Free Software Foundation's rallying cry (and the reason OSI had to come up with "Open Source" to counter "Free Software"). Sticking the word "Free" on a public domain equivalent license (as far from copyleft as you can get) is either intentionally confusing or deeply clueless. Part of my attraction to public domain licensing is trying to counteract the damage GPLv3 did to the community at large when it fragmented copyleft into incompatible factions. There's no such thing as "The GPL" anymore, Linux and Samba implement two ends of the same protocol, are both GPL, and neither can use the other's code. Copyleft is now a significant _barrier_ to code reuse within copylefted projects. The result seems to be a generation of programmers who are lumping software copyrights in with software patents as "too dumb to live", and taking a napster-style civil disobedience approach, opting out of licensing their code at ALL until the whole corrupt intellectual property edifice collapses under its own weight. "No License Specified" continues to be the most common license on github _after_ its CEO made a big push to standardize on MIT licensing as a default. The percentage has gone _up_ in the past year: https://speakerdeck.com/benbalter/open-source-licensing-by-the-numbers?slide=41 If I just wanted a public domain license I could have grabbed creative commons zero (or the libtomcrypt license or unlicense.org or...) but I wanted the strategic advantage of the name "Zero Clause BSD" because the ability to say "we're more BSD than BSD" is an easy sell that short-circuits a lot of explanation. Attaching the Free Software Foundation's codeword "Free" to a non-copyleft license is... odd. Saying "when we use the word 'Free' we mean something different than when the Free Software Foundation uses the word 'Free'" is not an argument I want to make, especially not to people who have developed an _aversion_ to copyleft. Looks like Rob Landley was using it a year or more earlier: https://lwn.net/Articles/608082/ According to http://landley.net/hg/toybox/rev/264b9da809df since March 14, 2013, so 2 and a half years earlier than August 30 of this year. Checking my old email, I noticed 0BSD marked approved for 2.2 in your public spreadsheet July 19, 2015, so you'd already approved it a month and a half before the other guy submitted it to OSI. I'm guessing what happened here is that Android's "about->licenses" thing gives license text but not license names, so they made one up. Rob
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Rob Landley <rob@...> #1295 On 12/04/2015 07:54 PM, Richard Fontana wrote: Not really. I respect your desire to keep the name of the license you've been using and appreciate your policy objections to the name of the Free Public License; however I have no inclination to ask the OSI to change the name of the approved license (which seems to differ from 0BSD in one respect, namely the normative non-inclusion of a template copyright notice). The OpenBSD template had a copyright notice, therefore mine did. (I considered removing it, but since this _is_ a copyright license it makes sense to have it. There's no legal channel to abandon copyrights, especially in europe, but you can wildcard license them. And if you're licensing a copyright, you should probably have a copyright notice identifying who is licensing what.) I think then, if we assume that 0BSD and the Free Public License are really the same license from the SPDX world view standpoint, that this may unfortunately be the first departure from the trend of OSI endorsing the use of SPDX short names (I think the one for the recently-approved eCos license is a little problematic too). OSI is the organization that screwed up, not you. The submission they linked to was over a month after your decision was made, almost a year after android merged toybox, and 2 and 1/2 years after I started publicly using the license. Heck, I was exchanging research material with @theunlicense guys on twitter back in 2013: https://twitter.com/landley/status/464149188578512897 https://twitter.com/landley/status/464144896320741376 As far as I can tell, OSI continues to be unaware that unlicense.org or creative commons zero even exist. I encourage the SPDX group to consider coming up with a new short name for the Free Public License without altering the status of 0BSD. Thank you. I don't care what OSI does, their "James Ernest's Totally Renamed Spy Game" license isn't mentioned on https://opensource.org/licenses and in https://opensource.org/licenses/category it's one of 7 in its category ("Other/Miscelanous") within one of 9 categories. I just wanted to make sure SPDX wasn't changing its decision on 0BSD just because another organization started a redundant approval process after you'd _completed_ yours, and didn't do the research. Rob
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Richard Fontana <fontana@...> #1296 On Sat, Dec 05, 2015 at 12:57:43AM -0600, Rob Landley wrote: As far as I can tell, OSI continues to be unaware that unlicense.org or creative commons zero even exist. The OSI is aware of them. There's actually been interest for some time in getting OSI approval of a license (or license-like instrument) in this category, what I've recently been calling 'ultrapermissive'. CC0 was actually submitted by Creative Commons for OSI approval a few years ago. The submission was withdrawn because of controversy over clause 4a in CC0 ("No ... patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document."). The Unlicense hasn't been submitted for approval. I have now modified http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical to include Zero Clause BSD License (0BSD) with a cross reference to the Free Public License, and I have also added the following prefatory text to http://opensource.org/licenses/FPL-1.0.0: "Note: There is a license that is identical to the Free Public License 1.0.0 called the Zero Clause BSD License. Apart from the name, the only difference is that the Zero Clause BSD License has generally been used with a copyright notice, while the Free Public License has generally been used without a copyright notice." Hopefully that will remove whatever possibility there was of anyone thinking the Zero Clause BSD License (for those who choose to call it that) is not now OSI-approved by virtue of the approval of the Free Public License. However I still recommend that the SPDX group come up with a short identifier for the Free Public License that is different from "0BSD"; I'm going to pretend that it would be "FPL-1.0.0". Richard
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Rob Landley <rob@...> #1297 On 12/05/2015 06:36 AM, Richard Fontana wrote: I have now modified http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical to include Zero Clause BSD License (0BSD) with a cross reference to the Free Public License, and I have also added the following prefatory text to http://opensource.org/licenses/FPL-1.0.0: "Note: There is a license that is identical to the Free Public License 1.0.0 called the Zero Clause BSD License. Apart from the name, the only difference is that the Zero Clause BSD License has generally been used with a copyright notice, while the Free Public License has generally been used without a copyright notice." Thank you. However I still recommend that the SPDX group come up with a short identifier for the Free Public License that is different from "0BSD"; I'm going to pretend that it would be "FPL-1.0.0". Brontosaurus, Apatosaurus, either way Pluto's still a planet. Rob
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J Lovejoy #1298 HI All, Having a bit of a hard time following this, as I think Rob may have confused who was speaking on which organization’s behalf (Richard is coming from the OSI perspective, here) Correct me if I’m wrong, but the suggestion seems to be: OSI has now posted the "Free Public License 1.0.0" and wants to use the short identifier FPL-1.0.0 This license is, according to the SPDX Matching Guidelines, the same license the Rob submitted previously and which was added to SPDX License List v2.2 as "BSD Zero Clause License” using the short identifier 0BSD Now, the OSI wants SPDX to change its short identifier to FPL-1.0.0 - is that right? And if so, why would you want us to do that? We endeavor not to change the short identifiers unless there is an extremely compelling reason and users of the SPDX License List (of which there are many) rely on us to not make such changes unnecessarily. I’m not sure I see the compelling reason here, especially when, as Rob has now told us, part of the reason he submitted the license to be on the SPDX License List was as per the request of a large company using the SPDX short identifiers. We do have some flexibility with the full name, which would be reasonably to change to something like, "BSD Zero Clause / Free Public License 1.0.0” (clunky, perhaps) and then also add a note as Richard did explaining the similarity-yet-name-variation-possibility. However, changing the short identifier is a much more serious consideration. We have a legal call this Thursday, so any info as to why we should change that part or if my above idea would be amenable to all would be helpful. Thanks, Jilayne SPDX Legal Team co-lead opensource@... toggle quoted message Show quoted text On Dec 5, 2015, at 12:36 PM, Richard Fontana <fontana@...> wrote: On Sat, Dec 05, 2015 at 12:57:43AM -0600, Rob Landley wrote: As far as I can tell, OSI continues to be unaware that unlicense.org or creative commons zero even exist. The OSI is aware of them. There's actually been interest for some time in getting OSI approval of a license (or license-like instrument) in this category, what I've recently been calling 'ultrapermissive'. CC0 was actually submitted by Creative Commons for OSI approval a few years ago. The submission was withdrawn because of controversy over clause 4a in CC0 ("No ... patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document."). The Unlicense hasn't been submitted for approval. I have now modified http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical to include Zero Clause BSD License (0BSD) with a cross reference to the Free Public License, and I have also added the following prefatory text to http://opensource.org/licenses/FPL-1.0.0: "Note: There is a license that is identical to the Free Public License 1.0.0 called the Zero Clause BSD License. Apart from the name, the only difference is that the Zero Clause BSD License has generally been used with a copyright notice, while the Free Public License has generally been used without a copyright notice." Hopefully that will remove whatever possibility there was of anyone thinking the Zero Clause BSD License (for those who choose to call it that) is not now OSI-approved by virtue of the approval of the Free Public License. However I still recommend that the SPDX group come up with a short identifier for the Free Public License that is different from "0BSD"; I'm going to pretend that it would be "FPL-1.0.0". Richard
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Richard Fontana <fontana@...> #1299 On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 07:30:18PM +0000, J Lovejoy wrote: Correct me if I’m wrong, but the suggestion seems to be: OSI has now posted the "Free Public License 1.0.0" and wants to use the short identifier FPL-1.0.0 Well that identifier (or something else that bears some similarity to the license name as approved by the OSI) is my own suggestion, not the view of the whole OSI board. I haven't bothered to explain this issue to the board, as I'm not sure it's that significant. This license is, according to the SPDX Matching Guidelines, the same license the Rob submitted previously and which was added to SPDX License List v2.2 as "BSD Zero Clause License” using the short identifier 0BSD Now, the OSI wants SPDX to change its short identifier to FPL-1.0.0 - is that right? And if so, why would you want us to do that? My reasoning is as follows: 1) The license that was submitted to and approved by the OSI is called the 'Free Public License 1.0.0'. I note that Rob Landley chose not to submit the Zero Clause BSD License for OSI approval as of course is his prerogative. 2) I think it is confusing to have a short identifier that looks nothing like the name of the thing, especially given that most if not all of the SPDX short identifiers have some clear relationship to the name of the license being identified. 3) While I have no inherent problem with the name 'Zero Clause BSD License', it does bother me that the name has 'BSD' in it but the license text is not clearly descended from the BSD license family. In this sense both the name and the identifier are flawed. There is no parallelism between the Zero Clause BSD License and the well-known 3-clause and 2-clause BSD licenses. I would probably not be objecting to the identifier if it were '0ISC' rather than '0BSD' because the Zero Clause BSD License is a stripped-down ISC license, not a stripped-down BSD license. 4) Since I am coming at this from a viewpoint that is biased in favor of the name of the license as submitted to the OSI, I can only object to the idea that OSI should be expected to apply the identifier '0BSD' to a license called the Free Public License 1.0.0. 5) For some time there's been some desire on the part of the OSI to make use of the SPDX identifiers, and you can see evidence of this on the OSI website. But I think with the Free Public License 1.0.0 and also the recently-approved eCos License version 2.0 this policy has reached a breaking point. In the case of eCos we can't seriously be expected to entertain use of a short identifier that is longer than the name of the license. We endeavor not to change the short identifiers unless there is an extremely compelling reason and users of the SPDX License List (of which there are many) rely on us to not make such changes unnecessarily. I’m not sure I see the compelling reason here, especially when, as Rob has now told us, part of the reason he submitted the license to be on the SPDX License List was as per the request of a large company using the SPDX short identifiers. I'm not suggesting that the identifier be changed, but rather that two identifiers be adopted, each being considered equally official in an SPDX sense. Ultimately, the issue isn't too important, but I simply can't bring myself to use "0BSD" on the OSI website in the manner in which other SPDX short identifiers have now been used. (Although as noted I did use '0BSD' in my cross-referencing of the Zero Clause BSD License to the Free Public License.) Similarly, I can't bring myself to use the lengthy GPL exception identifier in connection with the eCos License. Richard We do have some flexibility with the full name, which would be reasonably to change to something like, "BSD Zero Clause / Free Public License 1.0.0” (clunky, perhaps) and then also add a note as Richard did explaining the similarity-yet-name-variation-possibility. However, changing the short identifier is a much more serious consideration. We have a legal call this Thursday, so any info as to why we should change that part or if my above idea would be amenable to all would be helpful. Thanks, Jilayne SPDX Legal Team co-lead opensource@... On Dec 5, 2015, at 12:36 PM, Richard Fontana <fontana@...> wrote: On Sat, Dec 05, 2015 at 12:57:43AM -0600, Rob Landley wrote: As far as I can tell, OSI continues to be unaware that unlicense.org or creative commons zero even exist. The OSI is aware of them. There's actually been interest for some time in getting OSI approval of a license (or license-like instrument) in this category, what I've recently been calling 'ultrapermissive'. CC0 was actually submitted by Creative Commons for OSI approval a few years ago. The submission was withdrawn because of controversy over clause 4a in CC0 ("No ... patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document."). The Unlicense hasn't been submitted for approval. I have now modified http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical to include Zero Clause BSD License (0BSD) with a cross reference to the Free Public License, and I have also added the following prefatory text to http://opensource.org/licenses/FPL-1.0.0: "Note: There is a license that is identical to the Free Public License 1.0.0 called the Zero Clause BSD License. Apart from the name, the only difference is that the Zero Clause BSD License has generally been used with a copyright notice, while the Free Public License has generally been used without a copyright notice." Hopefully that will remove whatever possibility there was of anyone thinking the Zero Clause BSD License (for those who choose to call it that) is not now OSI-approved by virtue of the approval of the Free Public License. However I still recommend that the SPDX group come up with a short identifier for the Free Public License that is different from "0BSD"; I'm going to pretend that it would be "FPL-1.0.0". Richard
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Rob Landley <rob@...> #1300 The tl;dr of this whole email is "I humbly ask SPDX to retain both its original long and short names for zero clause BSD as the only SDPX approved name for this license". On 12/07/2015 01:56 PM, Richard Fontana wrote: On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 07:30:18PM +0000, J Lovejoy wrote: 3) While I have no inherent problem with the name 'Zero Clause BSD License', it does bother me that the name has 'BSD' in it but the license text is not clearly descended from the BSD license family. "I have no problem, and here it is..." In this sense both the name and the identifier are flawed. There is no parallelism between the Zero Clause BSD License and the well-known 3-clause and 2-clause BSD licenses. I would probably not be objecting to the identifier if it were '0ISC' rather than '0BSD' because the Zero Clause BSD License is a stripped-down ISC license, not a stripped-down BSD license. So you still haven't looked back at the SPDX approval process for zero clause BSD and noticed they raised that objection then, and got an answer? http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-June/001457.html If the association between this license and ISC was important, why didn't OSI's name for it mention ISC instead of making up a new name? This is not the only public domain license derived from BSD licenses in the wild. Here's one that did it by cutting down (I think, they don't bother to specify) FreeBSD's license: http://openwall.info/wiki/john/licensing And that page links to another project using a variant that cut it down a different way (also removing the virality but keeping the disclaimer). Lots of people have done this lots of ways over the years. And yet despite the many possible starting and ending points to strip licenses down to public domain variants, OSI approved _exactly_ the same text I chose. Which wasn't even submitted to OSI until a month after SPDX published their decision to approve it, a year after Android merged it, and two and a half years after I'd publicly started using it on a project that Linux Weekly News has covered multiple times. Not noticing _me_ is understandable, although it's not like I was being quiet about it (unless you consider giving licensing talks ala https://archive.org/download/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3 and http://2014.texaslinuxfest.org/content/rise-and-fall-copyleft.html and such to be "quiet"). I could even understand not noticing what Android was doing, although the rest of the industry seems to be paying attention. (The android command line is not a peripheral part of android, I got invited to Linux Plumber's to talk about this a couple months back, https://linuxplumbersconf.org/2015/ocw/proposals/2871 and yes I went over the licensing aspect at length in that talk and oh look, https://lwn.net/Articles/657139/ not only covers my talk by they linked to my license page, using my license's name as the link text. September 14 is 2 weeks after the submission OSI acted upon, so presumably right during OSI's analysis period?) OSI failing to notice any of that doesn't surprise me. But OSI didn't notice what _SPDX_ was doing, despite claiming to want to use SPDX identifiers and thus having pretty much a DUTY to keep up there, and is now asking SPDX to change to accommodate the results. That's the part I don't get. P.S. The JTR "BSD-like" license above recently came back to my attention because although it was initially introduced just for new code (in an otherwise GPLv2 project), a few days ago they started a concerted effort to clean out their existing codebase so it can all go under this public domain "BSD" license: http://www.openwall.com/lists/john-users/2015/12/04/2 I.E. This GPL->PD trend is ongoing, and likely to continue for the foreseeable future. That's why it's been a big enough issue for me to keep talking about it at conferences for almost three years now. I seem to be unusually careful in how I handle licensing for an open source developer, but people who _haven't_ been a plaintiff in multiple GPL enforcement suits and who weren't hired as a consultant by IBM's lawyers to help defend against the SCO lawsuit and _don't_ respond to people like Bruce Perens with https://busybox.net/~landley/forensics.txt are generally doing this stuff in a much more ad-hoc way that intentionally keeps lawyers as far away as possible. So legal groups may not be promptly hearing directly about it from them, but the return to public domain licensing isn't exactly a new issue out in the community. 4) Since I am coming at this from a viewpoint that is biased in favor of the name of the license as submitted to the OSI, I can only object to the idea that OSI should be expected to apply the identifier '0BSD' to a license called the Free Public License 1.0.0. By the time this license was submitted to OSI, SPDX had already published its decision to approve it under the original BSD Zero Clause name a month and change earlier, Android had merged it the previous year, and I'd been publicly using it for 2 and 1/2 years in a project covered on multiple occasions by Linux Weekly news. Suggesting that SPDX amend an established decision predating the _submission_ OSI acted upon (let alone OSI's approval process), entirely because OSI did not do its homework, is not a comforting precedent. Until this all instances of this particular license being cut down in this particular way that I was aware of traced back to my doing so. Other people have cut down plenty of other licenses in other ways for this purpose, there are lots of starting and stopping points for a "public domain license". I was trying to come up with one that corporate legal departments could standardize on and that github could offer in its dropdown, and felt the OpenBSD license text best served my purpose there. I also emphasized that it was an existing license with half a sentence removed as part of this sales pitch. Perhaps the wording and the timing of OSI's submission, with approximately the same sales pitch as I gave in my talks and wrote up on my website, are just coincidences. I don't care about plagiarism or attribution here. What I am annoyed by is that SPDX's approval of the license I've been using for years under the name I've been using for years is now _retroactively_ threatened by OSI's actions. SPDX refusing to approve it would have been their right. (And given they already have https://spdx.org/licenses/Unlicense.html and https://spdx.org/licenses/CC0-1.0.html would even have been understandable.) OSI coming along after the fact and going "oh, we renamed a license that already exists, didn't even start the process until well after your decision was published, so clearly YOU should change" is just disturbing. 5) For some time there's been some desire on the part of the OSI to make use of the SPDX identifiers, and you can see evidence of this on the OSI website. But I think with the Free Public License 1.0.0 and also the recently-approved eCos License version 2.0 this policy has reached a breaking point. In the case of eCos we can't seriously be expected to entertain use of a short identifier that is longer than the name of the license. Great, eCos already broke your policy, moot point then. You can stop expecting 100% correspondence on every license now and just use the ones you find convenient. Glad we could resolve this. (You're the one who brought it up...?) We endeavor not to change the short identifiers unless there is an extremely compelling reason and users of the SPDX License List (of which there are many) rely on us to not make such changes unnecessarily. I’m not sure I see the compelling reason here, especially when, as Rob has now told us, part of the reason he submitted the license to be on the SPDX License List was as per the request of a large company using the SPDX short identifiers. I'm not suggesting that the identifier be changed, I also would like to avoid the SPDX identifier(s) changing. but rather that two identifiers be adopted, each being considered equally official in an SPDX sense. Oh please no. First, two names for the same thing blunts the marketing pitch. Second, the venn diagram of "programmers who want something with Free in the name" and "programmers who want to get as far away from copyleft as possible" is basically two discrete circles. Attaching part of the Free Software Foundation's name on this license would be detrimental to what I'm trying to accomplish (increasing acceptance of public domain licensing and migrating github users off of "no license specified"). Ultimately, the issue isn't too important, If it doesn't affect what SPDX does, I agree. but I simply can't bring myself to use "0BSD" on the OSI website in the manner in which other SPDX short identifiers have now been used. Then... don't use it? OSI failed to notice that SPDX had already approved a nearly identical license a month and change before OSI even received its submission. I noticed the approval over a month before your license's submission date by checking SPDX's public spreadsheet of upcoming license approvals. That OSI did _not_ do this, despite OSI's desire to use SPDX identifiers, was a failure on OSI's part. You've brought up eCos to indicate that this is not a unique failure. I don't see how resolving the resulting conflict is SPDX's problem? We do have some flexibility with the full name, which would be reasonably to change to something like, "BSD Zero Clause / Free Public License 1.0.0” (clunky, perhaps) and then also add a note as Richard did explaining the similarity-yet-name-variation-possibility. Richard Stallman has spent well over a decade attempting to associate "free software" with copyleft. If you google for "free public software" the first hit is http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html (and if you add "license" the first hit is the FSF's GPLv3 page). This is not a neutral term when discussing licenses. I'd really rather ignore OSI entirely than explain that after zero clause bsd had been in use for years, after it had been merged into android and tizen, and after SPDX had published a decision to approve it, OSI randomly accepted the same license under a different and misleading name because this guy https://github.com/christianbundy said so and OSI didn't do its homework. (Ok, that photo with the caption "this guy" would make an entertaining slide, but entertaining damage control is still damage control.) But I doubt it will come up if SPDX leaves the existing names in place. I was asked to submit this license to SPDX because people care about that. Nobody ever asked me to submit it to OSI. Rob
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J Lovejoy #1301 Richard, Has anyone from OSI gone back to the folks who submitted the “Free Public License” and ask if they mind or care if the name that Rob prefers is used instead of the one they suggested? Seems like that could potentially be an easy solution. Jilayne SPDX Legal Team co-lead opensource@... toggle quoted message Show quoted text On Dec 8, 2015, at 6:17 AM, Rob Landley <rob@...> wrote: The tl;dr of this whole email is "I humbly ask SPDX to retain both its original long and short names for zero clause BSD as the only SDPX approved name for this license". On 12/07/2015 01:56 PM, Richard Fontana wrote: On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 07:30:18PM +0000, J Lovejoy wrote: 3) While I have no inherent problem with the name 'Zero Clause BSD License', it does bother me that the name has 'BSD' in it but the license text is not clearly descended from the BSD license family. "I have no problem, and here it is..." In this sense both the name and the identifier are flawed. There is no parallelism between the Zero Clause BSD License and the well-known 3-clause and 2-clause BSD licenses. I would probably not be objecting to the identifier if it were '0ISC' rather than '0BSD' because the Zero Clause BSD License is a stripped-down ISC license, not a stripped-down BSD license. So you still haven't looked back at the SPDX approval process for zero clause BSD and noticed they raised that objection then, and got an answer? http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-June/001457.html If the association between this license and ISC was important, why didn't OSI's name for it mention ISC instead of making up a new name? This is not the only public domain license derived from BSD licenses in the wild. Here's one that did it by cutting down (I think, they don't bother to specify) FreeBSD's license: http://openwall.info/wiki/john/licensing And that page links to another project using a variant that cut it down a different way (also removing the virality but keeping the disclaimer). Lots of people have done this lots of ways over the years. And yet despite the many possible starting and ending points to strip licenses down to public domain variants, OSI approved _exactly_ the same text I chose. Which wasn't even submitted to OSI until a month after SPDX published their decision to approve it, a year after Android merged it, and two and a half years after I'd publicly started using it on a project that Linux Weekly News has covered multiple times. Not noticing _me_ is understandable, although it's not like I was being quiet about it (unless you consider giving licensing talks ala https://archive.org/download/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3 and http://2014.texaslinuxfest.org/content/rise-and-fall-copyleft.html and such to be "quiet"). I could even understand not noticing what Android was doing, although the rest of the industry seems to be paying attention. (The android command line is not a peripheral part of android, I got invited to Linux Plumber's to talk about this a couple months back, https://linuxplumbersconf.org/2015/ocw/proposals/2871 and yes I went over the licensing aspect at length in that talk and oh look, https://lwn.net/Articles/657139/ not only covers my talk by they linked to my license page, using my license's name as the link text. September 14 is 2 weeks after the submission OSI acted upon, so presumably right during OSI's analysis period?) OSI failing to notice any of that doesn't surprise me. But OSI didn't notice what _SPDX_ was doing, despite claiming to want to use SPDX identifiers and thus having pretty much a DUTY to keep up there, and is now asking SPDX to change to accommodate the results. That's the part I don't get. P.S. The JTR "BSD-like" license above recently came back to my attention because although it was initially introduced just for new code (in an otherwise GPLv2 project), a few days ago they started a concerted effort to clean out their existing codebase so it can all go under this public domain "BSD" license: http://www.openwall.com/lists/john-users/2015/12/04/2 I.E. This GPL->PD trend is ongoing, and likely to continue for the foreseeable future. That's why it's been a big enough issue for me to keep talking about it at conferences for almost three years now. I seem to be unusually careful in how I handle licensing for an open source developer, but people who _haven't_ been a plaintiff in multiple GPL enforcement suits and who weren't hired as a consultant by IBM's lawyers to help defend against the SCO lawsuit and _don't_ respond to people like Bruce Perens with https://busybox.net/~landley/forensics.txt are generally doing this stuff in a much more ad-hoc way that intentionally keeps lawyers as far away as possible. So legal groups may not be promptly hearing directly about it from them, but the return to public domain licensing isn't exactly a new issue out in the community. 4) Since I am coming at this from a viewpoint that is biased in favor of the name of the license as submitted to the OSI, I can only object to the idea that OSI should be expected to apply the identifier '0BSD' to a license called the Free Public License 1.0.0. By the time this license was submitted to OSI, SPDX had already published its decision to approve it under the original BSD Zero Clause name a month and change earlier, Android had merged it the previous year, and I'd been publicly using it for 2 and 1/2 years in a project covered on multiple occasions by Linux Weekly news. Suggesting that SPDX amend an established decision predating the _submission_ OSI acted upon (let alone OSI's approval process), entirely because OSI did not do its homework, is not a comforting precedent. Until this all instances of this particular license being cut down in this particular way that I was aware of traced back to my doing so. Other people have cut down plenty of other licenses in other ways for this purpose, there are lots of starting and stopping points for a "public domain license". I was trying to come up with one that corporate legal departments could standardize on and that github could offer in its dropdown, and felt the OpenBSD license text best served my purpose there. I also emphasized that it was an existing license with half a sentence removed as part of this sales pitch. Perhaps the wording and the timing of OSI's submission, with approximately the same sales pitch as I gave in my talks and wrote up on my website, are just coincidences. I don't care about plagiarism or attribution here. What I am annoyed by is that SPDX's approval of the license I've been using for years under the name I've been using for years is now _retroactively_ threatened by OSI's actions. SPDX refusing to approve it would have been their right. (And given they already have https://spdx.org/licenses/Unlicense.html and https://spdx.org/licenses/CC0-1.0.html would even have been understandable.) OSI coming along after the fact and going "oh, we renamed a license that already exists, didn't even start the process until well after your decision was published, so clearly YOU should change" is just disturbing. 5) For some time there's been some desire on the part of the OSI to make use of the SPDX identifiers, and you can see evidence of this on the OSI website. But I think with the Free Public License 1.0.0 and also the recently-approved eCos License version 2.0 this policy has reached a breaking point. In the case of eCos we can't seriously be expected to entertain use of a short identifier that is longer than the name of the license. Great, eCos already broke your policy, moot point then. You can stop expecting 100% correspondence on every license now and just use the ones you find convenient. Glad we could resolve this. (You're the one who brought it up...?) We endeavor not to change the short identifiers unless there is an extremely compelling reason and users of the SPDX License List (of which there are many) rely on us to not make such changes unnecessarily. I’m not sure I see the compelling reason here, especially when, as Rob has now told us, part of the reason he submitted the license to be on the SPDX License List was as per the request of a large company using the SPDX short identifiers. I'm not suggesting that the identifier be changed, I also would like to avoid the SPDX identifier(s) changing. but rather that two identifiers be adopted, each being considered equally official in an SPDX sense. Oh please no. First, two names for the same thing blunts the marketing pitch. Second, the venn diagram of "programmers who want something with Free in the name" and "programmers who want to get as far away from copyleft as possible" is basically two discrete circles. Attaching part of the Free Software Foundation's name on this license would be detrimental to what I'm trying to accomplish (increasing acceptance of public domain licensing and migrating github users off of "no license specified"). Ultimately, the issue isn't too important, If it doesn't affect what SPDX does, I agree. but I simply can't bring myself to use "0BSD" on the OSI website in the manner in which other SPDX short identifiers have now been used. Then... don't use it? OSI failed to notice that SPDX had already approved a nearly identical license a month and change before OSI even received its submission. I noticed the approval over a month before your license's submission date by checking SPDX's public spreadsheet of upcoming license approvals. That OSI did _not_ do this, despite OSI's desire to use SPDX identifiers, was a failure on OSI's part. You've brought up eCos to indicate that this is not a unique failure. I don't see how resolving the resulting conflict is SPDX's problem? We do have some flexibility with the full name, which would be reasonably to change to something like, "BSD Zero Clause / Free Public License 1.0.0” (clunky, perhaps) and then also add a note as Richard did explaining the similarity-yet-name-variation-possibility. Richard Stallman has spent well over a decade attempting to associate "free software" with copyleft. If you google for "free public software" the first hit is http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html (and if you add "license" the first hit is the FSF's GPLv3 page). This is not a neutral term when discussing licenses. I'd really rather ignore OSI entirely than explain that after zero clause bsd had been in use for years, after it had been merged into android and tizen, and after SPDX had published a decision to approve it, OSI randomly accepted the same license under a different and misleading name because this guy https://github.com/christianbundy said so and OSI didn't do its homework. (Ok, that photo with the caption "this guy" would make an entertaining slide, but entertaining damage control is still damage control.) But I doubt it will come up if SPDX leaves the existing names in place. I was asked to submit this license to SPDX because people care about that. Nobody ever asked me to submit it to OSI. Rob
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Richard Fontana <fontana@...> #1304 Hi Jilayne, No but that was my thought as well after reading Rob's response. I will check. Thanks, Richard toggle quoted message Show quoted text On Tue, Dec 08, 2015 at 08:16:15AM +0000, J Lovejoy wrote: Richard, Has anyone from OSI gone back to the folks who submitted the “Free Public License” and ask if they mind or care if the name that Rob prefers is used instead of the one they suggested? Seems like that could potentially be an easy solution. Jilayne SPDX Legal Team co-lead opensource@... On Dec 8, 2015, at 6:17 AM, Rob Landley <rob@...> wrote: The tl;dr of this whole email is "I humbly ask SPDX to retain both its original long and short names for zero clause BSD as the only SDPX approved name for this license". On 12/07/2015 01:56 PM, Richard Fontana wrote: On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 07:30:18PM +0000, J Lovejoy wrote: 3) While I have no inherent problem with the name 'Zero Clause BSD License', it does bother me that the name has 'BSD' in it but the license text is not clearly descended from the BSD license family. "I have no problem, and here it is..." In this sense both the name and the identifier are flawed. There is no parallelism between the Zero Clause BSD License and the well-known 3-clause and 2-clause BSD licenses. I would probably not be objecting to the identifier if it were '0ISC' rather than '0BSD' because the Zero Clause BSD License is a stripped-down ISC license, not a stripped-down BSD license. So you still haven't looked back at the SPDX approval process for zero clause BSD and noticed they raised that objection then, and got an answer? http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-June/001457.html If the association between this license and ISC was important, why didn't OSI's name for it mention ISC instead of making up a new name? This is not the only public domain license derived from BSD licenses in the wild. Here's one that did it by cutting down (I think, they don't bother to specify) FreeBSD's license: http://openwall.info/wiki/john/licensing And that page links to another project using a variant that cut it down a different way (also removing the virality but keeping the disclaimer). Lots of people have done this lots of ways over the years. And yet despite the many possible starting and ending points to strip licenses down to public domain variants, OSI approved _exactly_ the same text I chose. Which wasn't even submitted to OSI until a month after SPDX published their decision to approve it, a year after Android merged it, and two and a half years after I'd publicly started using it on a project that Linux Weekly News has covered multiple times. Not noticing _me_ is understandable, although it's not like I was being quiet about it (unless you consider giving licensing talks ala https://archive.org/download/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3 and http://2014.texaslinuxfest.org/content/rise-and-fall-copyleft.html and such to be "quiet"). I could even understand not noticing what Android was doing, although the rest of the industry seems to be paying attention. (The android command line is not a peripheral part of android, I got invited to Linux Plumber's to talk about this a couple months back, https://linuxplumbersconf.org/2015/ocw/proposals/2871 and yes I went over the licensing aspect at length in that talk and oh look, https://lwn.net/Articles/657139/ not only covers my talk by they linked to my license page, using my license's name as the link text. September 14 is 2 weeks after the submission OSI acted upon, so presumably right during OSI's analysis period?) OSI failing to notice any of that doesn't surprise me. But OSI didn't notice what _SPDX_ was doing, despite claiming to want to use SPDX identifiers and thus having pretty much a DUTY to keep up there, and is now asking SPDX to change to accommodate the results. That's the part I don't get. P.S. The JTR "BSD-like" license above recently came back to my attention because although it was initially introduced just for new code (in an otherwise GPLv2 project), a few days ago they started a concerted effort to clean out their existing codebase so it can all go under this public domain "BSD" license: http://www.openwall.com/lists/john-users/2015/12/04/2 I.E. This GPL->PD trend is ongoing, and likely to continue for the foreseeable future. That's why it's been a big enough issue for me to keep talking about it at conferences for almost three years now. I seem to be unusually careful in how I handle licensing for an open source developer, but people who _haven't_ been a plaintiff in multiple GPL enforcement suits and who weren't hired as a consultant by IBM's lawyers to help defend against the SCO lawsuit and _don't_ respond to people like Bruce Perens with https://busybox.net/~landley/forensics.txt are generally doing this stuff in a much more ad-hoc way that intentionally keeps lawyers as far away as possible. So legal groups may not be promptly hearing directly about it from them, but the return to public domain licensing isn't exactly a new issue out in the community. 4) Since I am coming at this from a viewpoint that is biased in favor of the name of the license as submitted to the OSI, I can only object to the idea that OSI should be expected to apply the identifier '0BSD' to a license called the Free Public License 1.0.0. By the time this license was submitted to OSI, SPDX had already published its decision to approve it under the original BSD Zero Clause name a month and change earlier, Android had merged it the previous year, and I'd been publicly using it for 2 and 1/2 years in a project covered on multiple occasions by Linux Weekly news. Suggesting that SPDX amend an established decision predating the _submission_ OSI acted upon (let alone OSI's approval process), entirely because OSI did not do its homework, is not a comforting precedent. Until this all instances of this particular license being cut down in this particular way that I was aware of traced back to my doing so. Other people have cut down plenty of other licenses in other ways for this purpose, there are lots of starting and stopping points for a "public domain license". I was trying to come up with one that corporate legal departments could standardize on and that github could offer in its dropdown, and felt the OpenBSD license text best served my purpose there. I also emphasized that it was an existing license with half a sentence removed as part of this sales pitch. Perhaps the wording and the timing of OSI's submission, with approximately the same sales pitch as I gave in my talks and wrote up on my website, are just coincidences. I don't care about plagiarism or attribution here. What I am annoyed by is that SPDX's approval of the license I've been using for years under the name I've been using for years is now _retroactively_ threatened by OSI's actions. SPDX refusing to approve it would have been their right. (And given they already have https://spdx.org/licenses/Unlicense.html and https://spdx.org/licenses/CC0-1.0.html would even have been understandable.) OSI coming along after the fact and going "oh, we renamed a license that already exists, didn't even start the process until well after your decision was published, so clearly YOU should change" is just disturbing. 5) For some time there's been some desire on the part of the OSI to make use of the SPDX identifiers, and you can see evidence of this on the OSI website. But I think with the Free Public License 1.0.0 and also the recently-approved eCos License version 2.0 this policy has reached a breaking point. In the case of eCos we can't seriously be expected to entertain use of a short identifier that is longer than the name of the license. Great, eCos already broke your policy, moot point then. You can stop expecting 100% correspondence on every license now and just use the ones you find convenient. Glad we could resolve this. (You're the one who brought it up...?) We endeavor not to change the short identifiers unless there is an extremely compelling reason and users of the SPDX License List (of which there are many) rely on us to not make such changes unnecessarily. I’m not sure I see the compelling reason here, especially when, as Rob has now told us, part of the reason he submitted the license to be on the SPDX License List was as per the request of a large company using the SPDX short identifiers. I'm not suggesting that the identifier be changed, I also would like to avoid the SPDX identifier(s) changing. but rather that two identifiers be adopted, each being considered equally official in an SPDX sense. Oh please no. First, two names for the same thing blunts the marketing pitch. Second, the venn diagram of "programmers who want something with Free in the name" and "programmers who want to get as far away from copyleft as possible" is basically two discrete circles. Attaching part of the Free Software Foundation's name on this license would be detrimental to what I'm trying to accomplish (increasing acceptance of public domain licensing and migrating github users off of "no license specified"). Ultimately, the issue isn't too important, If it doesn't affect what SPDX does, I agree. but I simply can't bring myself to use "0BSD" on the OSI website in the manner in which other SPDX short identifiers have now been used. Then... don't use it? OSI failed to notice that SPDX had already approved a nearly identical license a month and change before OSI even received its submission. I noticed the approval over a month before your license's submission date by checking SPDX's public spreadsheet of upcoming license approvals. That OSI did _not_ do this, despite OSI's desire to use SPDX identifiers, was a failure on OSI's part. You've brought up eCos to indicate that this is not a unique failure. I don't see how resolving the resulting conflict is SPDX's problem? We do have some flexibility with the full name, which would be reasonably to change to something like, "BSD Zero Clause / Free Public License 1.0.0” (clunky, perhaps) and then also add a note as Richard did explaining the similarity-yet-name-variation-possibility. Richard Stallman has spent well over a decade attempting to associate "free software" with copyleft. If you google for "free public software" the first hit is http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html (and if you add "license" the first hit is the FSF's GPLv3 page). This is not a neutral term when discussing licenses. I'd really rather ignore OSI entirely than explain that after zero clause bsd had been in use for years, after it had been merged into android and tizen, and after SPDX had published a decision to approve it, OSI randomly accepted the same license under a different and misleading name because this guy https://github.com/christianbundy said so and OSI didn't do its homework. (Ok, that photo with the caption "this guy" would make an entertaining slide, but entertaining damage control is still damage control.) But I doubt it will come up if SPDX leaves the existing names in place. I was asked to submit this license to SPDX because people care about that. Nobody ever asked me to submit it to OSI. Rob
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Richard Fontana <fontana@...> #1302 (Forwarding this to spdx-legal.) toggle quoted message Show quoted text On Tue, Dec 08, 2015 at 06:56:09AM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote: Hi Jilayne, No but that was my thought as well after reading Rob's response. I will check. Thanks, Richard On Tue, Dec 08, 2015 at 08:16:15AM +0000, J Lovejoy wrote: Richard, Has anyone from OSI gone back to the folks who submitted the “Free Public License” and ask if they mind or care if the name that Rob prefers is used instead of the one they suggested? Seems like that could potentially be an easy solution. Jilayne SPDX Legal Team co-lead opensource@... On Dec 8, 2015, at 6:17 AM, Rob Landley <rob@...> wrote: The tl;dr of this whole email is "I humbly ask SPDX to retain both its original long and short names for zero clause BSD as the only SDPX approved name for this license". On 12/07/2015 01:56 PM, Richard Fontana wrote: On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 07:30:18PM +0000, J Lovejoy wrote: 3) While I have no inherent problem with the name 'Zero Clause BSD License', it does bother me that the name has 'BSD' in it but the license text is not clearly descended from the BSD license family. "I have no problem, and here it is..." In this sense both the name and the identifier are flawed. There is no parallelism between the Zero Clause BSD License and the well-known 3-clause and 2-clause BSD licenses. I would probably not be objecting to the identifier if it were '0ISC' rather than '0BSD' because the Zero Clause BSD License is a stripped-down ISC license, not a stripped-down BSD license. So you still haven't looked back at the SPDX approval process for zero clause BSD and noticed they raised that objection then, and got an answer? http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-June/001457.html If the association between this license and ISC was important, why didn't OSI's name for it mention ISC instead of making up a new name? This is not the only public domain license derived from BSD licenses in the wild. Here's one that did it by cutting down (I think, they don't bother to specify) FreeBSD's license: http://openwall.info/wiki/john/licensing And that page links to another project using a variant that cut it down a different way (also removing the virality but keeping the disclaimer). Lots of people have done this lots of ways over the years. And yet despite the many possible starting and ending points to strip licenses down to public domain variants, OSI approved _exactly_ the same text I chose. Which wasn't even submitted to OSI until a month after SPDX published their decision to approve it, a year after Android merged it, and two and a half years after I'd publicly started using it on a project that Linux Weekly News has covered multiple times. Not noticing _me_ is understandable, although it's not like I was being quiet about it (unless you consider giving licensing talks ala https://archive.org/download/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3 and http://2014.texaslinuxfest.org/content/rise-and-fall-copyleft.html and such to be "quiet"). I could even understand not noticing what Android was doing, although the rest of the industry seems to be paying attention. (The android command line is not a peripheral part of android, I got invited to Linux Plumber's to talk about this a couple months back, https://linuxplumbersconf.org/2015/ocw/proposals/2871 and yes I went over the licensing aspect at length in that talk and oh look, https://lwn.net/Articles/657139/ not only covers my talk by they linked to my license page, using my license's name as the link text. September 14 is 2 weeks after the submission OSI acted upon, so presumably right during OSI's analysis period?) OSI failing to notice any of that doesn't surprise me. But OSI didn't notice what _SPDX_ was doing, despite claiming to want to use SPDX identifiers and thus having pretty much a DUTY to keep up there, and is now asking SPDX to change to accommodate the results. That's the part I don't get. P.S. The JTR "BSD-like" license above recently came back to my attention because although it was initially introduced just for new code (in an otherwise GPLv2 project), a few days ago they started a concerted effort to clean out their existing codebase so it can all go under this public domain "BSD" license: http://www.openwall.com/lists/john-users/2015/12/04/2 I.E. This GPL->PD trend is ongoing, and likely to continue for the foreseeable future. That's why it's been a big enough issue for me to keep talking about it at conferences for almost three years now. I seem to be unusually careful in how I handle licensing for an open source developer, but people who _haven't_ been a plaintiff in multiple GPL enforcement suits and who weren't hired as a consultant by IBM's lawyers to help defend against the SCO lawsuit and _don't_ respond to people like Bruce Perens with https://busybox.net/~landley/forensics.txt are generally doing this stuff in a much more ad-hoc way that intentionally keeps lawyers as far away as possible. So legal groups may not be promptly hearing directly about it from them, but the return to public domain licensing isn't exactly a new issue out in the community. 4) Since I am coming at this from a viewpoint that is biased in favor of the name of the license as submitted to the OSI, I can only object to the idea that OSI should be expected to apply the identifier '0BSD' to a license called the Free Public License 1.0.0. By the time this license was submitted to OSI, SPDX had already published its decision to approve it under the original BSD Zero Clause name a month and change earlier, Android had merged it the previous year, and I'd been publicly using it for 2 and 1/2 years in a project covered on multiple occasions by Linux Weekly news. Suggesting that SPDX amend an established decision predating the _submission_ OSI acted upon (let alone OSI's approval process), entirely because OSI did not do its homework, is not a comforting precedent. Until this all instances of this particular license being cut down in this particular way that I was aware of traced back to my doing so. Other people have cut down plenty of other licenses in other ways for this purpose, there are lots of starting and stopping points for a "public domain license". I was trying to come up with one that corporate legal departments could standardize on and that github could offer in its dropdown, and felt the OpenBSD license text best served my purpose there. I also emphasized that it was an existing license with half a sentence removed as part of this sales pitch. Perhaps the wording and the timing of OSI's submission, with approximately the same sales pitch as I gave in my talks and wrote up on my website, are just coincidences. I don't care about plagiarism or attribution here. What I am annoyed by is that SPDX's approval of the license I've been using for years under the name I've been using for years is now _retroactively_ threatened by OSI's actions. SPDX refusing to approve it would have been their right. (And given they already have https://spdx.org/licenses/Unlicense.html and https://spdx.org/licenses/CC0-1.0.html would even have been understandable.) OSI coming along after the fact and going "oh, we renamed a license that already exists, didn't even start the process until well after your decision was published, so clearly YOU should change" is just disturbing. 5) For some time there's been some desire on the part of the OSI to make use of the SPDX identifiers, and you can see evidence of this on the OSI website. But I think with the Free Public License 1.0.0 and also the recently-approved eCos License version 2.0 this policy has reached a breaking point. In the case of eCos we can't seriously be expected to entertain use of a short identifier that is longer than the name of the license. Great, eCos already broke your policy, moot point then. You can stop expecting 100% correspondence on every license now and just use the ones you find convenient. Glad we could resolve this. (You're the one who brought it up...?) We endeavor not to change the short identifiers unless there is an extremely compelling reason and users of the SPDX License List (of which there are many) rely on us to not make such changes unnecessarily. I’m not sure I see the compelling reason here, especially when, as Rob has now told us, part of the reason he submitted the license to be on the SPDX License List was as per the request of a large company using the SPDX short identifiers. I'm not suggesting that the identifier be changed, I also would like to avoid the SPDX identifier(s) changing. but rather that two identifiers be adopted, each being considered equally official in an SPDX sense. Oh please no. First, two names for the same thing blunts the marketing pitch. Second, the venn diagram of "programmers who want something with Free in the name" and "programmers who want to get as far away from copyleft as possible" is basically two discrete circles. Attaching part of the Free Software Foundation's name on this license would be detrimental to what I'm trying to accomplish (increasing acceptance of public domain licensing and migrating github users off of "no license specified"). Ultimately, the issue isn't too important, If it doesn't affect what SPDX does, I agree. but I simply can't bring myself to use "0BSD" on the OSI website in the manner in which other SPDX short identifiers have now been used. Then... don't use it? OSI failed to notice that SPDX had already approved a nearly identical license a month and change before OSI even received its submission. I noticed the approval over a month before your license's submission date by checking SPDX's public spreadsheet of upcoming license approvals. That OSI did _not_ do this, despite OSI's desire to use SPDX identifiers, was a failure on OSI's part. You've brought up eCos to indicate that this is not a unique failure. I don't see how resolving the resulting conflict is SPDX's problem? We do have some flexibility with the full name, which would be reasonably to change to something like, "BSD Zero Clause / Free Public License 1.0.0” (clunky, perhaps) and then also add a note as Richard did explaining the similarity-yet-name-variation-possibility. Richard Stallman has spent well over a decade attempting to associate "free software" with copyleft. If you google for "free public software" the first hit is http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html (and if you add "license" the first hit is the FSF's GPLv3 page). This is not a neutral term when discussing licenses. I'd really rather ignore OSI entirely than explain that after zero clause bsd had been in use for years, after it had been merged into android and tizen, and after SPDX had published a decision to approve it, OSI randomly accepted the same license under a different and misleading name because this guy https://github.com/christianbundy said so and OSI didn't do its homework. (Ok, that photo with the caption "this guy" would make an entertaining slide, but entertaining damage control is still damage control.) But I doubt it will come up if SPDX leaves the existing names in place. I was asked to submit this license to SPDX because people care about that. Nobody ever asked me to submit it to OSI. Rob
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J Lovejoy #1303 Thanks Richard - that would be great. Let us know what you find out! Jilayne toggle quoted message Show quoted text On Dec 8, 2015, at 12:01 PM, Richard Fontana <fontana@...> wrote: (Forwarding this to spdx-legal.) On Tue, Dec 08, 2015 at 06:56:09AM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote: Hi Jilayne, No but that was my thought as well after reading Rob's response. I will check. Thanks, Richard On Tue, Dec 08, 2015 at 08:16:15AM +0000, J Lovejoy wrote: Richard, Has anyone from OSI gone back to the folks who submitted the “Free Public License” and ask if they mind or care if the name that Rob prefers is used instead of the one they suggested? Seems like that could potentially be an easy solution. Jilayne SPDX Legal Team co-lead opensource@... On Dec 8, 2015, at 6:17 AM, Rob Landley <rob@...> wrote: The tl;dr of this whole email is "I humbly ask SPDX to retain both its original long and short names for zero clause BSD as the only SDPX approved name for this license". On 12/07/2015 01:56 PM, Richard Fontana wrote: On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 07:30:18PM +0000, J Lovejoy wrote: 3) While I have no inherent problem with the name 'Zero Clause BSD License', it does bother me that the name has 'BSD' in it but the license text is not clearly descended from the BSD license family. "I have no problem, and here it is..." In this sense both the name and the identifier are flawed. There is no parallelism between the Zero Clause BSD License and the well-known 3-clause and 2-clause BSD licenses. I would probably not be objecting to the identifier if it were '0ISC' rather than '0BSD' because the Zero Clause BSD License is a stripped-down ISC license, not a stripped-down BSD license. So you still haven't looked back at the SPDX approval process for zero clause BSD and noticed they raised that objection then, and got an answer? http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-June/001457.html If the association between this license and ISC was important, why didn't OSI's name for it mention ISC instead of making up a new name? This is not the only public domain license derived from BSD licenses in the wild. Here's one that did it by cutting down (I think, they don't bother to specify) FreeBSD's license: http://openwall.info/wiki/john/licensing And that page links to another project using a variant that cut it down a different way (also removing the virality but keeping the disclaimer). Lots of people have done this lots of ways over the years. And yet despite the many possible starting and ending points to strip licenses down to public domain variants, OSI approved _exactly_ the same text I chose. Which wasn't even submitted to OSI until a month after SPDX published their decision to approve it, a year after Android merged it, and two and a half years after I'd publicly started using it on a project that Linux Weekly News has covered multiple times. Not noticing _me_ is understandable, although it's not like I was being quiet about it (unless you consider giving licensing talks ala https://archive.org/download/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3 and http://2014.texaslinuxfest.org/content/rise-and-fall-copyleft.html and such to be "quiet"). I could even understand not noticing what Android was doing, although the rest of the industry seems to be paying attention. (The android command line is not a peripheral part of android, I got invited to Linux Plumber's to talk about this a couple months back, https://linuxplumbersconf.org/2015/ocw/proposals/2871 and yes I went over the licensing aspect at length in that talk and oh look, https://lwn.net/Articles/657139/ not only covers my talk by they linked to my license page, using my license's name as the link text. September 14 is 2 weeks after the submission OSI acted upon, so presumably right during OSI's analysis period?) OSI failing to notice any of that doesn't surprise me. But OSI didn't notice what _SPDX_ was doing, despite claiming to want to use SPDX identifiers and thus having pretty much a DUTY to keep up there, and is now asking SPDX to change to accommodate the results. That's the part I don't get. P.S. The JTR "BSD-like" license above recently came back to my attention because although it was initially introduced just for new code (in an otherwise GPLv2 project), a few days ago they started a concerted effort to clean out their existing codebase so it can all go under this public domain "BSD" license: http://www.openwall.com/lists/john-users/2015/12/04/2 I.E. This GPL->PD trend is ongoing, and likely to continue for the foreseeable future. That's why it's been a big enough issue for me to keep talking about it at conferences for almost three years now. I seem to be unusually careful in how I handle licensing for an open source developer, but people who _haven't_ been a plaintiff in multiple GPL enforcement suits and who weren't hired as a consultant by IBM's lawyers to help defend against the SCO lawsuit and _don't_ respond to people like Bruce Perens with https://busybox.net/~landley/forensics.txt are generally doing this stuff in a much more ad-hoc way that intentionally keeps lawyers as far away as possible. So legal groups may not be promptly hearing directly about it from them, but the return to public domain licensing isn't exactly a new issue out in the community. 4) Since I am coming at this from a viewpoint that is biased in favor of the name of the license as submitted to the OSI, I can only object to the idea that OSI should be expected to apply the identifier '0BSD' to a license called the Free Public License 1.0.0. By the time this license was submitted to OSI, SPDX had already published its decision to approve it under the original BSD Zero Clause name a month and change earlier, Android had merged it the previous year, and I'd been publicly using it for 2 and 1/2 years in a project covered on multiple occasions by Linux Weekly news. Suggesting that SPDX amend an established decision predating the _submission_ OSI acted upon (let alone OSI's approval process), entirely because OSI did not do its homework, is not a comforting precedent. Until this all instances of this particular license being cut down in this particular way that I was aware of traced back to my doing so. Other people have cut down plenty of other licenses in other ways for this purpose, there are lots of starting and stopping points for a "public domain license". I was trying to come up with one that corporate legal departments could standardize on and that github could offer in its dropdown, and felt the OpenBSD license text best served my purpose there. I also emphasized that it was an existing license with half a sentence removed as part of this sales pitch. Perhaps the wording and the timing of OSI's submission, with approximately the same sales pitch as I gave in my talks and wrote up on my website, are just coincidences. I don't care about plagiarism or attribution here. What I am annoyed by is that SPDX's approval of the license I've been using for years under the name I've been using for years is now _retroactively_ threatened by OSI's actions. SPDX refusing to approve it would have been their right. (And given they already have https://spdx.org/licenses/Unlicense.html and https://spdx.org/licenses/CC0-1.0.html would even have been understandable.) OSI coming along after the fact and going "oh, we renamed a license that already exists, didn't even start the process until well after your decision was published, so clearly YOU should change" is just disturbing. 5) For some time there's been some desire on the part of the OSI to make use of the SPDX identifiers, and you can see evidence of this on the OSI website. But I think with the Free Public License 1.0.0 and also the recently-approved eCos License version 2.0 this policy has reached a breaking point. In the case of eCos we can't seriously be expected to entertain use of a short identifier that is longer than the name of the license. Great, eCos already broke your policy, moot point then. You can stop expecting 100% correspondence on every license now and just use the ones you find convenient. Glad we could resolve this. (You're the one who brought it up...?) We endeavor not to change the short identifiers unless there is an extremely compelling reason and users of the SPDX License List (of which there are many) rely on us to not make such changes unnecessarily. I’m not sure I see the compelling reason here, especially when, as Rob has now told us, part of the reason he submitted the license to be on the SPDX License List was as per the request of a large company using the SPDX short identifiers. I'm not suggesting that the identifier be changed, I also would like to avoid the SPDX identifier(s) changing. but rather that two identifiers be adopted, each being considered equally official in an SPDX sense. Oh please no. First, two names for the same thing blunts the marketing pitch. Second, the venn diagram of "programmers who want something with Free in the name" and "programmers who want to get as far away from copyleft as possible" is basically two discrete circles. Attaching part of the Free Software Foundation's name on this license would be detrimental to what I'm trying to accomplish (increasing acceptance of public domain licensing and migrating github users off of "no license specified"). Ultimately, the issue isn't too important, If it doesn't affect what SPDX does, I agree. but I simply can't bring myself to use "0BSD" on the OSI website in the manner in which other SPDX short identifiers have now been used. Then... don't use it? OSI failed to notice that SPDX had already approved a nearly identical license a month and change before OSI even received its submission. I noticed the approval over a month before your license's submission date by checking SPDX's public spreadsheet of upcoming license approvals. That OSI did _not_ do this, despite OSI's desire to use SPDX identifiers, was a failure on OSI's part. You've brought up eCos to indicate that this is not a unique failure. I don't see how resolving the resulting conflict is SPDX's problem? We do have some flexibility with the full name, which would be reasonably to change to something like, "BSD Zero Clause / Free Public License 1.0.0” (clunky, perhaps) and then also add a note as Richard did explaining the similarity-yet-name-variation-possibility. Richard Stallman has spent well over a decade attempting to associate "free software" with copyleft. If you google for "free public software" the first hit is http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html (and if you add "license" the first hit is the FSF's GPLv3 page). This is not a neutral term when discussing licenses. I'd really rather ignore OSI entirely than explain that after zero clause bsd had been in use for years, after it had been merged into android and tizen, and after SPDX had published a decision to approve it, OSI randomly accepted the same license under a different and misleading name because this guy https://github.com/christianbundy said so and OSI didn't do its homework. (Ok, that photo with the caption "this guy" would make an entertaining slide, but entertaining damage control is still damage control.) But I doubt it will come up if SPDX leaves the existing names in place. I was asked to submit this license to SPDX because people care about that. Nobody ever asked me to submit it to OSI. Rob _______________________________________________ Spdx-legal mailing list Spdx-legal@... https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal
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J Lovejoy #1305 Having more of a think on this - It may be more appropriate for Rob to talk to the “Free Public License” folks. Rob - your thoughts? Cheers, Jilayne On Tue, Dec 08, 2015 at 06:56:09AM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote: Hi Jilayne, No but that was my thought as well after reading Rob's response. I will check. Thanks, Richard On Tue, Dec 08, 2015 at 08:16:15AM +0000, J Lovejoy wrote: Richard, Has anyone from OSI gone back to the folks who submitted the “Free Public License” and ask if they mind or care if the name that Rob prefers is used instead of the one they suggested? Seems like that could potentially be an easy solution. Jilayne SPDX Legal Team co-lead opensource@... On Dec 8, 2015, at 6:17 AM, Rob Landley <rob@...> wrote: The tl;dr of this whole email is "I humbly ask SPDX to retain both its original long and short names for zero clause BSD as the only SDPX approved name for this license". On 12/07/2015 01:56 PM, Richard Fontana wrote: On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 07:30:18PM +0000, J Lovejoy wrote: 3) While I have no inherent problem with the name 'Zero Clause BSD License', it does bother me that the name has 'BSD' in it but the license text is not clearly descended from the BSD license family. "I have no problem, and here it is..." In this sense both the name and the identifier are flawed. There is no parallelism between the Zero Clause BSD License and the well-known 3-clause and 2-clause BSD licenses. I would probably not be objecting to the identifier if it were '0ISC' rather than '0BSD' because the Zero Clause BSD License is a stripped-down ISC license, not a stripped-down BSD license. So you still haven't looked back at the SPDX approval process for zero clause BSD and noticed they raised that objection then, and got an answer? http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-June/001457.html If the association between this license and ISC was important, why didn't OSI's name for it mention ISC instead of making up a new name? This is not the only public domain license derived from BSD licenses in the wild. Here's one that did it by cutting down (I think, they don't bother to specify) FreeBSD's license: http://openwall.info/wiki/john/licensing And that page links to another project using a variant that cut it down a different way (also removing the virality but keeping the disclaimer). Lots of people have done this lots of ways over the years. And yet despite the many possible starting and ending points to strip licenses down to public domain variants, OSI approved _exactly_ the same text I chose. Which wasn't even submitted to OSI until a month after SPDX published their decision to approve it, a year after Android merged it, and two and a half years after I'd publicly started using it on a project that Linux Weekly News has covered multiple times. Not noticing _me_ is understandable, although it's not like I was being quiet about it (unless you consider giving licensing talks ala https://archive.org/download/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3 and http://2014.texaslinuxfest.org/content/rise-and-fall-copyleft.html and such to be "quiet"). I could even understand not noticing what Android was doing, although the rest of the industry seems to be paying attention. (The android command line is not a peripheral part of android, I got invited to Linux Plumber's to talk about this a couple months back, https://linuxplumbersconf.org/2015/ocw/proposals/2871 and yes I went over the licensing aspect at length in that talk and oh look, https://lwn.net/Articles/657139/ not only covers my talk by they linked to my license page, using my license's name as the link text. September 14 is 2 weeks after the submission OSI acted upon, so presumably right during OSI's analysis period?) OSI failing to notice any of that doesn't surprise me. But OSI didn't notice what _SPDX_ was doing, despite claiming to want to use SPDX identifiers and thus having pretty much a DUTY to keep up there, and is now asking SPDX to change to accommodate the results. That's the part I don't get. P.S. The JTR "BSD-like" license above recently came back to my attention because although it was initially introduced just for new code (in an otherwise GPLv2 project), a few days ago they started a concerted effort to clean out their existing codebase so it can all go under this public domain "BSD" license: http://www.openwall.com/lists/john-users/2015/12/04/2 I.E. This GPL->PD trend is ongoing, and likely to continue for the foreseeable future. That's why it's been a big enough issue for me to keep talking about it at conferences for almost three years now. I seem to be unusually careful in how I handle licensing for an open source developer, but people who _haven't_ been a plaintiff in multiple GPL enforcement suits and who weren't hired as a consultant by IBM's lawyers to help defend against the SCO lawsuit and _don't_ respond to people like Bruce Perens with https://busybox.net/~landley/forensics.txt are generally doing this stuff in a much more ad-hoc way that intentionally keeps lawyers as far away as possible. So legal groups may not be promptly hearing directly about it from them, but the return to public domain licensing isn't exactly a new issue out in the community. 4) Since I am coming at this from a viewpoint that is biased in favor of the name of the license as submitted to the OSI, I can only object to the idea that OSI should be expected to apply the identifier '0BSD' to a license called the Free Public License 1.0.0. By the time this license was submitted to OSI, SPDX had already published its decision to approve it under the original BSD Zero Clause name a month and change earlier, Android had merged it the previous year, and I'd been publicly using it for 2 and 1/2 years in a project covered on multiple occasions by Linux Weekly news. Suggesting that SPDX amend an established decision predating the _submission_ OSI acted upon (let alone OSI's approval process), entirely because OSI did not do its homework, is not a comforting precedent. Until this all instances of this particular license being cut down in this particular way that I was aware of traced back to my doing so. Other people have cut down plenty of other licenses in other ways for this purpose, there are lots of starting and stopping points for a "public domain license". I was trying to come up with one that corporate legal departments could standardize on and that github could offer in its dropdown, and felt the OpenBSD license text best served my purpose there. I also emphasized that it was an existing license with half a sentence removed as part of this sales pitch. Perhaps the wording and the timing of OSI's submission, with approximately the same sales pitch as I gave in my talks and wrote up on my website, are just coincidences. I don't care about plagiarism or attribution here. What I am annoyed by is that SPDX's approval of the license I've been using for years under the name I've been using for years is now _retroactively_ threatened by OSI's actions. SPDX refusing to approve it would have been their right. (And given they already have https://spdx.org/licenses/Unlicense.html and https://spdx.org/licenses/CC0-1.0.html would even have been understandable.) OSI coming along after the fact and going "oh, we renamed a license that already exists, didn't even start the process until well after your decision was published, so clearly YOU should change" is just disturbing. 5) For some time there's been some desire on the part of the OSI to make use of the SPDX identifiers, and you can see evidence of this on the OSI website. But I think with the Free Public License 1.0.0 and also the recently-approved eCos License version 2.0 this policy has reached a breaking point. In the case of eCos we can't seriously be expected to entertain use of a short identifier that is longer than the name of the license. Great, eCos already broke your policy, moot point then. You can stop expecting 100% correspondence on every license now and just use the ones you find convenient. Glad we could resolve this. (You're the one who brought it up...?) We endeavor not to change the short identifiers unless there is an extremely compelling reason and users of the SPDX License List (of which there are many) rely on us to not make such changes unnecessarily. I’m not sure I see the compelling reason here, especially when, as Rob has now told us, part of the reason he submitted the license to be on the SPDX License List was as per the request of a large company using the SPDX short identifiers. I'm not suggesting that the identifier be changed, I also would like to avoid the SPDX identifier(s) changing. but rather that two identifiers be adopted, each being considered equally official in an SPDX sense. Oh please no. First, two names for the same thing blunts the marketing pitch. Second, the venn diagram of "programmers who want something with Free in the name" and "programmers who want to get as far away from copyleft as possible" is basically two discrete circles. Attaching part of the Free Software Foundation's name on this license would be detrimental to what I'm trying to accomplish (increasing acceptance of public domain licensing and migrating github users off of "no license specified"). Ultimately, the issue isn't too important, If it doesn't affect what SPDX does, I agree. but I simply can't bring myself to use "0BSD" on the OSI website in the manner in which other SPDX short identifiers have now been used. Then... don't use it? OSI failed to notice that SPDX had already approved a nearly identical license a month and change before OSI even received its submission. I noticed the approval over a month before your license's submission date by checking SPDX's public spreadsheet of upcoming license approvals. That OSI did _not_ do this, despite OSI's desire to use SPDX identifiers, was a failure on OSI's part. You've brought up eCos to indicate that this is not a unique failure. I don't see how resolving the resulting conflict is SPDX's problem? We do have some flexibility with the full name, which would be reasonably to change to something like, "BSD Zero Clause / Free Public License 1.0.0” (clunky, perhaps) and then also add a note as Richard did explaining the similarity-yet-name-variation-possibility. Richard Stallman has spent well over a decade attempting to associate "free software" with copyleft. If you google for "free public software" the first hit is http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html (and if you add "license" the first hit is the FSF's GPLv3 page). This is not a neutral term when discussing licenses. I'd really rather ignore OSI entirely than explain that after zero clause bsd had been in use for years, after it had been merged into android and tizen, and after SPDX had published a decision to approve it, OSI randomly accepted the same license under a different and misleading name because this guy https://github.com/christianbundy said so and OSI didn't do its homework. (Ok, that photo with the caption "this guy" would make an entertaining slide, but entertaining damage control is still damage control.) But I doubt it will come up if SPDX leaves the existing names in place. I was asked to submit this license to SPDX because people care about that. Nobody ever asked me to submit it to OSI. Rob _______________________________________________ Spdx-legal mailing list Spdx-legal@... https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal SPDX Legal Team co-lead opensource@...
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Richard Fontana <fontana@...> #1307 I don't think that is a good idea. I have described the situation to Christian Bundy, the person who submitted the Free Public License, with a link to this discussion. He said he would get back to me by the end of the week. If Christian does not recommend otherwise I will keep things as they currently are on the OSI website. Richard toggle quoted message Show quoted text On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 07:31:00AM +0000, J Lovejoy wrote: Having more of a think on this - It may be more appropriate for Rob to talk to the “Free Public License” folks. Rob - your thoughts? Cheers, Jilayne On Tue, Dec 08, 2015 at 06:56:09AM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote: Hi Jilayne, No but that was my thought as well after reading Rob's response. I will check. Thanks, Richard On Tue, Dec 08, 2015 at 08:16:15AM +0000, J Lovejoy wrote: Richard, Has anyone from OSI gone back to the folks who submitted the “Free Public License” and ask if they mind or care if the name that Rob prefers is used instead of the one they suggested? Seems like that could potentially be an easy solution. Jilayne SPDX Legal Team co-lead opensource@... On Dec 8, 2015, at 6:17 AM, Rob Landley <rob@...> wrote: The tl;dr of this whole email is "I humbly ask SPDX to retain both its original long and short names for zero clause BSD as the only SDPX approved name for this license". On 12/07/2015 01:56 PM, Richard Fontana wrote: On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 07:30:18PM +0000, J Lovejoy wrote: 3) While I have no inherent problem with the name 'Zero Clause BSD License', it does bother me that the name has 'BSD' in it but the license text is not clearly descended from the BSD license family. "I have no problem, and here it is..." In this sense both the name and the identifier are flawed. There is no parallelism between the Zero Clause BSD License and the well-known 3-clause and 2-clause BSD licenses. I would probably not be objecting to the identifier if it were '0ISC' rather than '0BSD' because the Zero Clause BSD License is a stripped-down ISC license, not a stripped-down BSD license. So you still haven't looked back at the SPDX approval process for zero clause BSD and noticed they raised that objection then, and got an answer? http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-June/001457.html If the association between this license and ISC was important, why didn't OSI's name for it mention ISC instead of making up a new name? This is not the only public domain license derived from BSD licenses in the wild. Here's one that did it by cutting down (I think, they don't bother to specify) FreeBSD's license: http://openwall.info/wiki/john/licensing And that page links to another project using a variant that cut it down a different way (also removing the virality but keeping the disclaimer). Lots of people have done this lots of ways over the years. And yet despite the many possible starting and ending points to strip licenses down to public domain variants, OSI approved _exactly_ the same text I chose. Which wasn't even submitted to OSI until a month after SPDX published their decision to approve it, a year after Android merged it, and two and a half years after I'd publicly started using it on a project that Linux Weekly News has covered multiple times. Not noticing _me_ is understandable, although it's not like I was being quiet about it (unless you consider giving licensing talks ala https://archive.org/download/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3 and http://2014.texaslinuxfest.org/content/rise-and-fall-copyleft.html and such to be "quiet"). I could even understand not noticing what Android was doing, although the rest of the industry seems to be paying attention. (The android command line is not a peripheral part of android, I got invited to Linux Plumber's to talk about this a couple months back, https://linuxplumbersconf.org/2015/ocw/proposals/2871 and yes I went over the licensing aspect at length in that talk and oh look, https://lwn.net/Articles/657139/ not only covers my talk by they linked to my license page, using my license's name as the link text. September 14 is 2 weeks after the submission OSI acted upon, so presumably right during OSI's analysis period?) OSI failing to notice any of that doesn't surprise me. But OSI didn't notice what _SPDX_ was doing, despite claiming to want to use SPDX identifiers and thus having pretty much a DUTY to keep up there, and is now asking SPDX to change to accommodate the results. That's the part I don't get. P.S. The JTR "BSD-like" license above recently came back to my attention because although it was initially introduced just for new code (in an otherwise GPLv2 project), a few days ago they started a concerted effort to clean out their existing codebase so it can all go under this public domain "BSD" license: http://www.openwall.com/lists/john-users/2015/12/04/2 I.E. This GPL->PD trend is ongoing, and likely to continue for the foreseeable future. That's why it's been a big enough issue for me to keep talking about it at conferences for almost three years now. I seem to be unusually careful in how I handle licensing for an open source developer, but people who _haven't_ been a plaintiff in multiple GPL enforcement suits and who weren't hired as a consultant by IBM's lawyers to help defend against the SCO lawsuit and _don't_ respond to people like Bruce Perens with https://busybox.net/~landley/forensics.txt are generally doing this stuff in a much more ad-hoc way that intentionally keeps lawyers as far away as possible. So legal groups may not be promptly hearing directly about it from them, but the return to public domain licensing isn't exactly a new issue out in the community. 4) Since I am coming at this from a viewpoint that is biased in favor of the name of the license as submitted to the OSI, I can only object to the idea that OSI should be expected to apply the identifier '0BSD' to a license called the Free Public License 1.0.0. By the time this license was submitted to OSI, SPDX had already published its decision to approve it under the original BSD Zero Clause name a month and change earlier, Android had merged it the previous year, and I'd been publicly using it for 2 and 1/2 years in a project covered on multiple occasions by Linux Weekly news. Suggesting that SPDX amend an established decision predating the _submission_ OSI acted upon (let alone OSI's approval process), entirely because OSI did not do its homework, is not a comforting precedent. Until this all instances of this particular license being cut down in this particular way that I was aware of traced back to my doing so. Other people have cut down plenty of other licenses in other ways for this purpose, there are lots of starting and stopping points for a "public domain license". I was trying to come up with one that corporate legal departments could standardize on and that github could offer in its dropdown, and felt the OpenBSD license text best served my purpose there. I also emphasized that it was an existing license with half a sentence removed as part of this sales pitch. Perhaps the wording and the timing of OSI's submission, with approximately the same sales pitch as I gave in my talks and wrote up on my website, are just coincidences. I don't care about plagiarism or attribution here. What I am annoyed by is that SPDX's approval of the license I've been using for years under the name I've been using for years is now _retroactively_ threatened by OSI's actions. SPDX refusing to approve it would have been their right. (And given they already have https://spdx.org/licenses/Unlicense.html and https://spdx.org/licenses/CC0-1.0.html would even have been understandable.) OSI coming along after the fact and going "oh, we renamed a license that already exists, didn't even start the process until well after your decision was published, so clearly YOU should change" is just disturbing. 5) For some time there's been some desire on the part of the OSI to make use of the SPDX identifiers, and you can see evidence of this on the OSI website. But I think with the Free Public License 1.0.0 and also the recently-approved eCos License version 2.0 this policy has reached a breaking point. In the case of eCos we can't seriously be expected to entertain use of a short identifier that is longer than the name of the license. Great, eCos already broke your policy, moot point then. You can stop expecting 100% correspondence on every license now and just use the ones you find convenient. Glad we could resolve this. (You're the one who brought it up...?) We endeavor not to change the short identifiers unless there is an extremely compelling reason and users of the SPDX License List (of which there are many) rely on us to not make such changes unnecessarily. I’m not sure I see the compelling reason here, especially when, as Rob has now told us, part of the reason he submitted the license to be on the SPDX License List was as per the request of a large company using the SPDX short identifiers. I'm not suggesting that the identifier be changed, I also would like to avoid the SPDX identifier(s) changing. but rather that two identifiers be adopted, each being considered equally official in an SPDX sense. Oh please no. First, two names for the same thing blunts the marketing pitch. Second, the venn diagram of "programmers who want something with Free in the name" and "programmers who want to get as far away from copyleft as possible" is basically two discrete circles. Attaching part of the Free Software Foundation's name on this license would be detrimental to what I'm trying to accomplish (increasing acceptance of public domain licensing and migrating github users off of "no license specified"). Ultimately, the issue isn't too important, If it doesn't affect what SPDX does, I agree. but I simply can't bring myself to use "0BSD" on the OSI website in the manner in which other SPDX short identifiers have now been used. Then... don't use it? OSI failed to notice that SPDX had already approved a nearly identical license a month and change before OSI even received its submission. I noticed the approval over a month before your license's submission date by checking SPDX's public spreadsheet of upcoming license approvals. That OSI did _not_ do this, despite OSI's desire to use SPDX identifiers, was a failure on OSI's part. You've brought up eCos to indicate that this is not a unique failure. I don't see how resolving the resulting conflict is SPDX's problem? We do have some flexibility with the full name, which would be reasonably to change to something like, "BSD Zero Clause / Free Public License 1.0.0” (clunky, perhaps) and then also add a note as Richard did explaining the similarity-yet-name-variation-possibility. Richard Stallman has spent well over a decade attempting to associate "free software" with copyleft. If you google for "free public software" the first hit is http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html (and if you add "license" the first hit is the FSF's GPLv3 page). This is not a neutral term when discussing licenses. I'd really rather ignore OSI entirely than explain that after zero clause bsd had been in use for years, after it had been merged into android and tizen, and after SPDX had published a decision to approve it, OSI randomly accepted the same license under a different and misleading name because this guy https://github.com/christianbundy said so and OSI didn't do its homework. (Ok, that photo with the caption "this guy" would make an entertaining slide, but entertaining damage control is still damage control.) But I doubt it will come up if SPDX leaves the existing names in place. I was asked to submit this license to SPDX because people care about that. Nobody ever asked me to submit it to OSI. Rob _______________________________________________ Spdx-legal mailing list Spdx-legal@... https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal SPDX Legal Team co-lead opensource@...
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Rob Landley <rob@...> #1308 I'm visiting a sick friend in another state with spotty connectivity ("roaming" data caps are apparently still a thing in small towns) and don't get home until late sunday. But I'd be happy to when I get home. Thanks, Rob toggle quoted message Show quoted text On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 1:31 AM, J Lovejoy <opensource@...> wrote: Having more of a think on this - It may be more appropriate for Rob to talk to the “Free Public License” folks. Rob - your thoughts? Cheers, Jilayne On Tue, Dec 08, 2015 at 06:56:09AM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote: Hi Jilayne, No but that was my thought as well after reading Rob's response. I will check. Thanks, Richard On Tue, Dec 08, 2015 at 08:16:15AM +0000, J Lovejoy wrote: Richard, Has anyone from OSI gone back to the folks who submitted the “Free Public License” and ask if they mind or care if the name that Rob prefers is used instead of the one they suggested? Seems like that could potentially be an easy solution. Jilayne SPDX Legal Team co-lead opensource@... On Dec 8, 2015, at 6:17 AM, Rob Landley <rob@...> wrote: The tl;dr of this whole email is "I humbly ask SPDX to retain both its original long and short names for zero clause BSD as the only SDPX approved name for this license". On 12/07/2015 01:56 PM, Richard Fontana wrote: On Mon, Dec 07, 2015 at 07:30:18PM +0000, J Lovejoy wrote: 3) While I have no inherent problem with the name 'Zero Clause BSD License', it does bother me that the name has 'BSD' in it but the license text is not clearly descended from the BSD license family. "I have no problem, and here it is..." In this sense both the name and the identifier are flawed. There is no parallelism between the Zero Clause BSD License and the well-known 3-clause and 2-clause BSD licenses. I would probably not be objecting to the identifier if it were '0ISC' rather than '0BSD' because the Zero Clause BSD License is a stripped-down ISC license, not a stripped-down BSD license. So you still haven't looked back at the SPDX approval process for zero clause BSD and noticed they raised that objection then, and got an answer? http://lists.spdx.org/pipermail/spdx-legal/2015-June/001457.html If the association between this license and ISC was important, why didn't OSI's name for it mention ISC instead of making up a new name? This is not the only public domain license derived from BSD licenses in the wild. Here's one that did it by cutting down (I think, they don't bother to specify) FreeBSD's license: http://openwall.info/wiki/john/licensing And that page links to another project using a variant that cut it down a different way (also removing the virality but keeping the disclaimer). Lots of people have done this lots of ways over the years. And yet despite the many possible starting and ending points to strip licenses down to public domain variants, OSI approved _exactly_ the same text I chose. Which wasn't even submitted to OSI until a month after SPDX published their decision to approve it, a year after Android merged it, and two and a half years after I'd publicly started using it on a project that Linux Weekly News has covered multiple times. Not noticing _me_ is understandable, although it's not like I was being quiet about it (unless you consider giving licensing talks ala https://archive.org/download/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.mp3 and http://2014.texaslinuxfest.org/content/rise-and-fall-copyleft.html and such to be "quiet"). I could even understand not noticing what Android was doing, although the rest of the industry seems to be paying attention. (The android command line is not a peripheral part of android, I got invited to Linux Plumber's to talk about this a couple months back, https://linuxplumbersconf.org/2015/ocw/proposals/2871 and yes I went over the licensing aspect at length in that talk and oh look, https://lwn.net/Articles/657139/ not only covers my talk by they linked to my license page, using my license's name as the link text. September 14 is 2 weeks after the submission OSI acted upon, so presumably right during OSI's analysis period?) OSI failing to notice any of that doesn't surprise me. But OSI didn't notice what _SPDX_ was doing, despite claiming to want to use SPDX identifiers and thus having pretty much a DUTY to keep up there, and is now asking SPDX to change to accommodate the results. That's the part I don't get. P.S. The JTR "BSD-like" license above recently came back to my attention because although it was initially introduced just for new code (in an otherwise GPLv2 project), a few days ago they started a concerted effort to clean out their existing codebase so it can all go under this public domain "BSD" license: http://www.openwall.com/lists/john-users/2015/12/04/2 I.E. This GPL->PD trend is ongoing, and likely to continue for the foreseeable future. That's why it's been a big enough issue for me to keep talking about it at conferences for almost three years now. I seem to be unusually careful in how I handle licensing for an open source developer, but people who _haven't_ been a plaintiff in multiple GPL enforcement suits and who weren't hired as a consultant by IBM's lawyers to help defend against the SCO lawsuit and _don't_ respond to people like Bruce Perens with https://busybox.net/~landley/forensics.txt are generally doing this stuff in a much more ad-hoc way that intentionally keeps lawyers as far away as possible. So legal groups may not be promptly hearing directly about it from them, but the return to public domain licensing isn't exactly a new issue out in the community. 4) Since I am coming at this from a viewpoint that is biased in favor of the name of the license as submitted to the OSI, I can only object to the idea that OSI should be expected to apply the identifier '0BSD' to a license called the Free Public License 1.0.0. By the time this license was submitted to OSI, SPDX had already published its decision to approve it under the original BSD Zero Clause name a month and change earlier, Android had merged it the previous year, and I'd been publicly using it for 2 and 1/2 years in a project covered on multiple occasions by Linux Weekly news. Suggesting that SPDX amend an established decision predating the _submission_ OSI acted upon (let alone OSI's approval process), entirely because OSI did not do its homework, is not a comforting precedent. Until this all instances of this particular license being cut down in this particular way that I was aware of traced back to my doing so. Other people have cut down plenty of other licenses in other ways for this purpose, there are lots of starting and stopping points for a "public domain license". I was trying to come up with one that corporate legal departments could standardize on and that github could offer in its dropdown, and felt the OpenBSD license text best served my purpose there. I also emphasized that it was an existing license with half a sentence removed as part of this sales pitch. Perhaps the wording and the timing of OSI's submission, with approximately the same sales pitch as I gave in my talks and wrote up on my website, are just coincidences. I don't care about plagiarism or attribution here. What I am annoyed by is that SPDX's approval of the license I've been using for years under the name I've been using for years is now _retroactively_ threatened by OSI's actions. SPDX refusing to approve it would have been their right. (And given they already have https://spdx.org/licenses/Unlicense.html and https://spdx.org/licenses/CC0-1.0.html would even have been understandable.) OSI coming along after the fact and going "oh, we renamed a license that already exists, didn't even start the process until well after your decision was published, so clearly YOU should change" is just disturbing. 5) For some time there's been some desire on the part of the OSI to make use of the SPDX identifiers, and you can see evidence of this on the OSI website. But I think with the Free Public License 1.0.0 and also the recently-approved eCos License version 2.0 this policy has reached a breaking point. In the case of eCos we can't seriously be expected to entertain use of a short identifier that is longer than the name of the license. Great, eCos already broke your policy, moot point then. You can stop expecting 100% correspondence on every license now and just use the ones you find convenient. Glad we could resolve this. (You're the one who brought it up...?) We endeavor not to change the short identifiers unless there is an extremely compelling reason and users of the SPDX License List (of which there are many) rely on us to not make such changes unnecessarily. I’m not sure I see the compelling reason here, especially when, as Rob has now told us, part of the reason he submitted the license to be on the SPDX License List was as per the request of a large company using the SPDX short identifiers. I'm not suggesting that the identifier be changed, I also would like to avoid the SPDX identifier(s) changing. but rather that two identifiers be adopted, each being considered equally official in an SPDX sense. Oh please no. First, two names for the same thing blunts the marketing pitch. Second, the venn diagram of "programmers who want something with Free in the name" and "programmers who want to get as far away from copyleft as possible" is basically two discrete circles. Attaching part of the Free Software Foundation's name on this license would be detrimental to what I'm trying to accomplish (increasing acceptance of public domain licensing and migrating github users off of "no license specified"). Ultimately, the issue isn't too important, If it doesn't affect what SPDX does, I agree. but I simply can't bring myself to use "0BSD" on the OSI website in the manner in which other SPDX short identifiers have now been used. Then... don't use it? OSI failed to notice that SPDX had already approved a nearly identical license a month and change before OSI even received its submission. I noticed the approval over a month before your license's submission date by checking SPDX's public spreadsheet of upcoming license approvals. That OSI did _not_ do this, despite OSI's desire to use SPDX identifiers, was a failure on OSI's part. You've brought up eCos to indicate that this is not a unique failure. I don't see how resolving the resulting conflict is SPDX's problem? We do have some flexibility with the full name, which would be reasonably to change to something like, "BSD Zero Clause / Free Public License 1.0.0” (clunky, perhaps) and then also add a note as Richard did explaining the similarity-yet-name-variation-possibility. Richard Stallman has spent well over a decade attempting to associate "free software" with copyleft. If you google for "free public software" the first hit is http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.en.html (and if you add "license" the first hit is the FSF's GPLv3 page). This is not a neutral term when discussing licenses. I'd really rather ignore OSI entirely than explain that after zero clause bsd had been in use for years, after it had been merged into android and tizen, and after SPDX had published a decision to approve it, OSI randomly accepted the same license under a different and misleading name because this guy https://github.com/christianbundy said so and OSI didn't do its homework. (Ok, that photo with the caption "this guy" would make an entertaining slide, but entertaining damage control is still damage control.) But I doubt it will come up if SPDX leaves the existing names in place. I was asked to submit this license to SPDX because people care about that. Nobody ever asked me to submit it to OSI. Rob _______________________________________________ Spdx-legal mailing list Spdx-legal@... https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-legal SPDX Legal Team co-lead opensource@...
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