I want to have another go at gaining consensus on making tweaks to the OSI's presentation of the 3-clause BSD licence <http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause> to reduce license proliferation in the long term.
Legal advice tells me that two otherwise-identical BSD 3-clause licenses must be treated as different (and therefore both reproduced "in documentation and/or other materials") if they have different values for "<ORGANIZATION>" in the sentence in clause 3 which begins "Neither the name of the <ORGANIZATION> nor the names of its contributors...". These kind of license-body-wording tweaks have led to the following unique license type counts for Firefox OS: BSD2Clause: 30 BSD3Clause: 55 BSD4Clause: 12 In an ideal world, each of those numbers would be a "1". I'm sure BSD distributions have a similar problem with many near-identical license blocks. Proposal: replace "<ORGANIZATION>" with "copyright holder" on the OSI's 3-Clause page, and update the surrounding text to explain the situation. That update would be in a similar vein to the existing explanatory sentence: "In the original BSD license, both occurrences of the phrase "COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS" in the disclaimer read "REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS". I would argue that the above sentence also establishes a precedent that it's OK for the OSI copy of a historical license to be genericized in this non-parameterized way. This won't solve the license problem overnight, but if these licenses continue to be used, it might just reduce the problem over time. Clause 3 is a refusal of a blanket endorsement which would very likely be unlawful anyway. That's why we have the 2-clause BSD license - because that clause achieves next to nothing. But in the case of proliferation, it's actively harmful. Let's at least take a step to making it less so. Gerv _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
