From marekm@amelek.gda.pl Thu Nov 11 11:54:55 2004
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:38:08 +0200
From: Marek Michalkiewicz <marekm@amelek.gda.pl>
To: E. Weddington <ericw@evcohs.com>
Cc: avr-libc-dev@nongnu.org
Subject: Re: [avr-libc-dev] avr-libc license audit

On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 02:56:02PM -0600, E. Weddington wrote:
> 
> The problem is that the original LICENSE file said that avr-libc is 
> licensed with
> "Modified BSD license (no advertising clause)"
> There are many files in there that are *not licensed this way*, only 
> having 2 clauses and not including the "no advertising" clause.

Poorly defined operator precedence ;) - it was meant to be read as:

(no (advertising clause))

not as:

((no advertising) clause)

where the "advertising clause" is the one which was removed from the
original (4-clause) BSD license.  The problem (full-page ads, etc.)
is explained in http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html .

Some time ago, I chose the 3-clause BSD license as a fairly simple,
liberal and standard one.  Later, BSD people made it even simpler by
removing another clause (I guess it was a problem for someone again...
licensing issues are evil), and I have no problem with that, so I
started using the 2-clause license in newer files (and probably
forgot to update some of the older ones).

> The "no advertising" is only marginally restrictive:
> 
>   * Neither the name of the copyright holders nor the names of
>     contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived
>     from this software without specific prior written permission.
> 
> It only restricts the user of avr-libc so they don't go off and say 
> "Marek Michalkiewicz endorses the use of this product! :-) Buy it!". 
> This is a fairly reaonable restriction for users.

No problem for me either way - it was never my intent to add more
restrictions, as they only make things more complicated for everyone
(especially if one program contains code with different licenses: you
have to check each license if it is compatible with all others, grrr...).

> So, then do I have your permission to change the files that you hold a 
> copyright on to include the "no adverstising" clause? If yes, could you 
> CC avr-libc-dev?

Yes.  But, you could just as well do the reverse: ask authors who
hold copyright on files with 3-clause license if they agree to
remove that one clause (I agree, if I forgot to remove that clause
from any of the files I wrote).  It's up to you.  Sorry for not
speaking up about this earlier (I'm overworked as usual).

Thanks,
Marek



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