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From: Kirk McKusick <mckusick@mckusick.com>
To: Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
Subject: Re: License naming question.
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Reply-To: Kirk McKusick <mckusick@mckusick.com>
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Comments: In-reply-to Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
   message dated "Tue, 16 Oct 2018 17:57:10 -0500."
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> To: mckusick@mckusick.com
> From: Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
> Subject: License naming question.
> Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2018 17:57:10 -0500
> =

> Hi,
> =

> We spoke at Ohio Linuxfest back in 2013 (you attended my Rise and
> Fall of Copyleft talk, and then we talked in the hallway afterwards).
> =

> I _think_ I told you about my plans to try to promote public domain
> equivalent licensing, a concept which has a wikipedia page now:
> =

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_equivalent_license
> =

> For toybox what I did was take the OpenBSD suggested template license
> off their website and remove the half-sentence requiring people to
> copy that specific license text into derived works, and the resulting
> license made it past Google's lawyers! My toybox project has been
> providing the command line for android since Marshmallow
> (https://lwn.net/Articles/629362/) and we're making progress on
> getting android to build under android, the Bionic libc maintainer
> recently sent me a roadmap update about that:
> =

> https://github.com/landley/toybox/commit/92b359f00057
> =

> I called the resulting license "Zero Clause BSD" (by analogy with
> "Creative Commons Zero" and the existing 4 clause, 3 clause, and 2
> clause BSD licenses), and I even got SPDX approval for it in 2015
> (because Samsung asked me to shortly after Google merged it into
> AOSP, they'd been adding it aftermarket before then and having an
> SPDX identifier for the license simplified their internal bureaucracy).
> =

> Then a couple months after SPDX approved it, somebody _else_ submitted
> the same license to Eric Raymond's old Open Source Initiative using
> "Free" in the name, as in Free Software Foundation. (A sadly loaded
> term these days.)
> =

> I hadn't known they were still in the license approval business
> (they stopped approving new licenses in... 2012? And I remember
> them explicitly _rejecting_ CC0 saying public domain isn't a license,
> which their FAQ still talks about at
> https://opensource.org/faq#public-domain). But they approved the
> toybox license under a different name, then asked SPDX to retroactively
> change their name for it. (SPDX didn't, but OSI refused to admit
> it made a mistake, even though they said they had a policy to keep
> the names in sync. They hadn't done their homework.)
> =

> Now every time the license is considered for a new use, the confusion
> OSI caused tends to derail things:
> =

> https://github.com/david-a-wheeler/spdx-tutorial/issues/1
> =

> When github itself was considering adding 0BSD to its license
> pulldown (which would have been a big win), I was asked what I
> thought of the naming confusion, and I wrote two long things on my
> rationale with lots of links to earlier stuff, which you can read
> here if you'd like:
> =

> https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/issues/464
> =

> Anyway, I recently decided to ask OSI to admit they made a mistake
> and change their name for the license to match what SPDX did, and
> there was unanimous approval...
> =

> http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.or=
g/2018-September/003519.html
> =

> Until the same guy who was objecting last time showed up to continue
> to object.  He ignord the "who used it first" axis, and said he
> wanted to know which  name was used more today, and then when he
> lost that argument he said he objects to calling something a BSD
> license that isn't using Berkeley's original wording.
> =

> My question is: do you object to the name "Zero Clause BSD" for a
> public domain equivalent license that's the OpenBSD suggested
> template license with half a sentence removed?
> =

> If you want to stay out of this, I understand. I'm pretty sure I
> asked you this in 2013 before I started pushing the name, and
> wouldn't have if you'd objected then, but that was long ago and the
> water under the bridge is dead...
> =

> Thanks for your time, sorry that took so long to explain. (And even
> longer if you read the big long github choosealicense thread. :)
> =

> Rob

Thanks for the through explanation of the situation.

I have no objections to the name "Zero Clause BSD" for your license.

I hope that you are successful in getting OSI to change their name
for the license to match what SPDX did.

	Kirk McKusick

