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