From marekm@amelek.gda.pl Thu Nov 11 11:54:55 2004 Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:38:08 +0200 From: Marek Michalkiewicz To: E. Weddington 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 _______________________________________________ AVR-libc-dev mailing list AVR-libc-dev@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/avr-libc-dev