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The GNU lawyers advise: This license does have an unfortunate wording choice: it provides recipients with "Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or dist
by frik 12y ago
The GNU lawyers advise:
This license does have an unfortunate wording choice: it
provides recipients with "Permission to use, copy,
modify, and/or distribute this software…" This is roughly
the same language from the license of Pine that the
University of Washington later claimed prohibited people
from distributing modified versions of the software.
[...] to help make sure this language cannot cause any
trouble in the future, we encourage developers to choose
a different license for their own works. The Expat
License and FreeBSD License are similarly permissive and
brief.
-- https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ISC https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#ISC
- teamhappy 12y agoI never got that quote. Pine's license said "and," and so did the ISC license. FSF pointed that out and ISC changed the license. Now it says "and/or." Both OSI and FSF have approved the license. And then they added (updated?) the text you quoted, complaining about the use of "and/or" ?! The problem with Pine seems to have been that it is/was a registered trademark (compare node.js/io.js). Also note the "Richard Stallman claims [...]" part of the Wikipedia article. Also note that nobody actually sued anyone. And even if they would have, who says they would have won? (Never mind the fact that legal precedents don't really matter outside of the US.) All things considered. I think we're good. --- Nothing wrong with choosing the MIT license though. Or the FreeBSD license. Or zlib, if you don't care about attribution.