Re: dragonfly license

[Brooks Davis <brooks@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 10:54:32PM -0400, George Georgalis wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 11:23:24AM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote:
> >
> >:I'm writing some code that I'd like to apply a 'BSD' license to.
> >:
> >:I found the dragonfly copyright in cvs, which I could apply; however
> >:there is no simple instructions to reference it like I can for GNU, ie:
> >:
> >: DragonFlyBSD License (c) 2004, George Georgalis
> >:
> >:Is this silly? Should I just use FreeBSD license or copy the DFly
> >:copyright?
> >:
> >:// George
> >
> >    It's not silly, but it does point out a serious flaw with GNU.  In
> >    recent years GNU has tried to create a 'floating' copyright.  That is,
> >    one where the code simply references some ephermal standard gnu copyright
> >    residing somewhere outside the file being copyrighten.
> >
> >    This is very dangerous, because there is no court precedent for allowing
> >    a published work's copyright to change after the fact and no way to
> >    determine, short of recording an exact date and version (and hoping that
> >    the version is properly updated on the site), which copyright the source
> >    actually refers to.
> >
> >    Because of this and also because of the potential for the copyright
> >    statement to be 'lost', the BSD community has generally decided to
> >    include the whole copyright statement and license in each source file,
> >    and that is what we do too.
> >
> >    If you want to use a short form, and take the risk, best bet is to
> >    control the location of your copyright by publishing it on your own web
> >    site, or perhaps there is an open-source web site where you can publish
> >    it, and then referencing the URL in the source code as part of your
> >    copyright statement in the source code.  Just remember, though, your
> >    code will be 'out there' on the internet forever.  Your URL may not be.
> 
> For a concept that's easy to understand, "BSD license," adding 152 lines
> to code that may be well under that is irksome (especially when it is
> not necessarily even derived). I'm inclined to reference a url with the
> caveat the license is revoked if the original is lost/unverified -- not
> to be spiteful tomorrow, but convenient today.

A three clause license runs a whole 25 lines.  If that's too much,
consider a derivative of the ISC license which runs all of 13 lines.
The OpenBSD version is here:

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/share/misc/license.template?rev=1.2&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
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