Licensing #17
Description
It would be nice to have license file added to the repo.
But first goes the story of this intellectual property:
@colemar released his original changes on Gist under something like a Public Domain:
A day later @robinlandstrom, author of the original script released it under MIT.
But since MIT is ambiguous with respect to potential patent rights, I thought it would be nice for the project to use something more clear and modern.
In not so distant past writings of an I. P. lawyer Kyle E. Mitchell (event if they seems to be US centric) made me very much doubt about MIT:
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/03/09/Deprecation-Notice
- MIT and BSD don’t handle patents.
- MIT and BSD are hard to read.
[to an I. P. and contract lawyer] - It’s not clear what MIT and BSD are, legally.
[licenses vs contracts] - MIT and BSD attribution is a land mine.
- MIT and BSD breed confusion.
[due to a number of variants] - MIT and BSD don’t expect more contributors.
Apache License 2.0 could be useful here. But it really seems too complex for non-lawyer.
These observations made me rethink my future choices for my permissively oriented projects, and the research led me to a creation of Kyle and several other I. P. lawyers – the Blue Oak model license. Ways that authors* consider it to be better, are described here:
https://blueoakcouncil.org/2019/03/06/model.html
[*] At least part of whom knows how to write code.
IMO it's simple like MIT, it has patent attack protection like Apache 2.0, and is very likely to satisfy the I. P. lawyer.
So I very much want to try Blue Oak model license (BOML in short) for this project instead.
Some other authors are considering BOML too:
https://v5.chriskrycho.com/notes/blue-oak-model-license/
https://sts10.github.io/2023/01/26/exploring-new-software-licenses.html#what-other-licenses-are-out-there
Now if we are back to MIT (under which at least a part of the current script is published), I get that even after relicensing MIT the License and Copyright notices must remain in the inherited lines of software and the binary form:
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2022/03/07/Switching-Open-Software-Terms#quick-note-on-notices
By choosing BOML I also would like to avoid dual licensing or at least having to include MIT only because of BOML does the same, only seemingly cleaner way.
So even if only 8 lines of code (or rather data) remains in the current script coming from @robinlandstrom ..:
(TL;DR)
... I must ask: do you @robinlandstrom agree to switch these lines to Blue Oak model license?
PS. Not asking @colemar, since CC0 raises no requirements – just notifying you about the wanted change too :)