On 10/2/10 4:39 AM, Philippe Ombredanne wrote:

the idea is good, though we should not reinvent a license templates
syntax when the OSI has alreday done something.
They use angle brackets so I would suggest using the same, not square
brackets. See http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php for
instance.

I was unaware that OSI has a pattern for this already. I agree we should follow the pattern they have used.

Another note is that copyright notices (such as in the BSD example you
provide) may or may not be part of the license.
I consider them part of the license when the license text itself is
copyrighted explicitly (GPL, Apache).
In the case of a BSD, I would not consider the copyright notice to be
explicitly part of the license, and therefore likely not needed in a
templatized license.

That is an excellent point. it seems reasonable to treat the copyright declarations that are usually associated with the BSD license as not really part of the license. Could those of you with a legal background comment on this?

Peter Williams
<http://openlogic.com>