[ccan] ISC license?

[Joseph Adams]

Oops, forgot to copy the list.

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 12:55 AM, Rusty Russell <rusty at rustcorp.com.au> wrote:
> Hi Joey,
>
>   Finally glanced at your AVL code; noted the ISC license.  I'm not
> particularly fussed, but I found this note:
>
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
>
>        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.
>
>        ISC has told us they do not share the University of Washington's
>        interpretation, and we have every reason to believe them. Thus,
>        there's no reason to avoid software released under this license.
>        However, 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.
>
> I already have BSD-MIT in the CCAN tree, too...
>
> Cheers!
> Rusty.
>

I attached a patch changing the AVL module to the MIT license.

<IANAL>
On this subject, bear in mind that the 3-clause BSD is slightly more
restrictive than the FreeBSD and MIT licenses; namely:

 * 3. The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote products
 *    derived from this software without specific prior written permission

Note that this is not the bemoaned "advertising clause" that makes the
old 4-clause BSD license incompatible with the GPL.

Modules affected are array, block_pool, btree, ccan_tokenizer, and
stringmap (all of which are ones I submitted, incidentally).  I will
probably just submit another patch changing the first four over to the
MIT license (because I've been meaning to, anyway), but the stringmap
code is derived from another author's BSD3-licensed code.  For
stringmap (and other BSD3-licensed code introduced to CCAN in the
future), I think we'll need another file in licenses, perhaps called
BSD3.
</IANAL>


Joey