On Apr 28, 2018, at 04:31, Joshua Root wrote: > On 2018-4-28 13:04 , Ryan Schmidt wrote: >> According to WikiPedia, "All rights reserved" has no effect in any legal >> jurisdiction: >> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved >> >> Unless anyone knows otherwise, we may as well remove it everywhere. > > It's not even true since we explicitly grant rights to others in the > license.
Here's an in-depth post about this problem: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2121/mit-license-and-all-rights-reserved/4403#4403 It seems the phrase "All rights reserved" is contradictory and confusing in the case of an open-source license, and yet, it is part of the BSD license text. If we remove the phrase, can we still claim that we are using the BSD license? >>> @@ -11,7 +12,7 @@ >>> # 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright >>> # notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the >>> # documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. >>> -# 3. Neither the name of Apple Computer, Inc. nor the names of its >>> +# 3. Neither the name of The MacPorts Project nor the names of its >>> # contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from >>> # this software without specific prior written permission. >> >> The attribution to Apple in the license text appears in many files, not just >> this one. This file certainly didn't originate from Apple, but some MacPorts >> source files did, and I don't know what the correct treatment of those files >> is. Do we change them to MacPorts, since we maintain the files now, or do we >> need to retain the mention of Apple in those files that Apple originated, >> possibly adding our name to theirs? And if so, do we change their name to >> Apple Inc., since that is their name now? If someone could look up what the >> legally correct thing to do here is, that would be great. Whatever the >> outcome, we should apply it to all files. > > Apple definitely retains the copyright on any portions of the code that > were written at Apple. Their copyright notices and license should not be > removed. We add our own notices for the portions we write. We can either > choose to distribute those portions under the same license as Apple's > portions (including clause 3 which specifically mentions Apple's name) > or we can add our own license in addition, and the combined work would > be subject to both. > > Personally I don't think clause 3 is a huge deal. The sort of things it > restricts are probably restricted anyway in many jurisdictions. Not > worth adding a second, slightly different license in the affected files IMO. I'm not talking about removing or altering Apple's copyright notices; of course they should remain. I'm talking about clause 3 of the license, the non-endorsement clause. I didn't claim we should add a second slightly different license in the affected files. I claimed that we should not state, due to copy/paste error, that Apple is involved in files they were not involved with. And in the files that they were involved with, I wondered if we can modify clause 3 of the license text from only mentioning Apple to mentioning both Apple and MacPorts. The non-endorsement clause is gone entirely in the 2-clause BSD license, of course, but I don't know what would be involved with relicensing MacPorts under the 2-clause BSD license; it would probably be complicated.
