(Summary of the thread for Joey's benefit: some software mentioned on
debian-legal had a one-line license which was intended to be
almost-public-domain, but failed to give explicit permission to copy and
modify. Franck is talking to that software's author to get it relicensed in
a DFSG way; I suggested the ikiwiki basewiki license.)
On Fri, 23 Apr 2010 at 11:26:43 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
Franck Joncourt franck.m...@dthconnex.com writes:
On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 09:57:58PM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
A 2-line version that seems good is the one Joey Hess uses for the
parts of ikiwiki that get copied into users' wikis, among other
things:
http://git.ikiwiki.info/?p=ikiwiki;a=blob;f=debian/copyright
Redistribution and use in source and compiled forms, with or without
modification, are permitted under any circumstances. No warranty.
It's shorter than the canonical version of the WTFPL, and seems to
cover all the necessary things for a permissive free software
license:
* allows unmodified and modified copying
* allows binary distributions
* explicitly disclaims warranty (quite important in some
jurisdictions, I hear)
My one quibble is that the “No warranty” is open to misinterpretation.
(I usually make it a complete declarative sentence: “No warranty
expressed or implied.”) But not very much, so it's a minor quibble, and
I wouldn't reject any software on that basis.
Upstream took a look at it and is going to adpot this one.
Many thanks for your help.
Yes, thanks for presenting that license text; I agree that it's superior
to WTFPL, and worth suggesting for these use cases.
Does it have a snappy name that we can use to refer to it?
Not that I know of; judging by putting this wording into Google, only Joey
uses it. I called it the ikiwiki basewiki license above, but I don't think
that's necessarily a good way to refer to it out of context. The rest of
ikiwiki is not under this license (it's mostly GPL), and the definition
of the basewiki is ikiwiki jargon.
Joey, I don't suppose you have a name for this license? :-)
Regards,
Simon
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