Re: [License-discuss] Boilerplate license text for permissive licenses?
Possibly relevant/of interest to those following this thread, from a
student of Daniel's:
http://turingmachine.org/~dmg/temp/trevor_BSD_report_2012_12_23.pdf
I have not read it all yet, but it looks useful for informing our
discussion of how to clean up/further standardize the BSD/MIT/X11
variants, based on an analysis of 70K versions of the statements, as
found in Debian.
On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 11:28 AM, D M German wrote:
> Gervase Markham twisted the bytes to say:
>
>
>
> Hi Gervase,
>
> Why don't you try the tool we developed. It is a bit hacky, but it will
> help you do what you are doing automatically.
>
> http://github.com/dmgerman/ninka
>
> If you run the tool, make sure it is a copy of the code. It will
> create, for each file you specify in its command line (I recommend you
> use xargs to run it) several files. The ones you are looking for are:
>
> *license, *.senttok and *.goodsent
>
> they will abstract the information you are looking for.
>
> As I mentioned in the previous message, what is the code you are looking
> at? I can run the tool myself and give you the resulting data.
>
> -daniel
>
>
> Gervase> On 26/11/12 23:44, Luis Villa wrote:
> >> I wonder if there is an easy way to visualize the various changes you
> >> have in your data set, to see where people agreed/disagreed/edited,
> >> outside the obvious changes. Daniel German, cc'd, may have already
> >> tackled this, or have other ideas along these lines.
>
> Gervase> I don't have an automated way. I gave myself 10 minutes to do it by
> Gervase> hand, and the results are as follows:
>
> Gervase> :
>
> Gervase> * "the author"
> Gervase> * "the above-listed copyright holder(s)"
> Gervase> * "Yahoo! Inc.", followed by "nor the names of YUI's contributors"
> Gervase> * "the copyright holder"
> Gervase> * "Google"
> Gervase> * "the Eclipse Foundation, Inc."
> Gervase> * "the University"
> Gervase> * "Google Inc."
> Gervase> * "the Xiph.org Foundation nor Pinknoise Productions Ltd"
> Gervase> * "TransGaming Inc., Google Inc., 3DLabs Inc. Ltd.,"
> Gervase> * "the David Beazley or Dabeaz LLC" (!)
> Gervase> * "the Jython Developers"
> Gervase> * "KTH"
> Gervase> * "The Android Open Source Project"
> Gervase> * Rewording: "The names of the authors may not be used to
> endorse..."
> Gervase> * Rewording: "The names of the author may not be used to endorse..."
> Gervase> * "David Young"
> Gervase> * "the project"
> Gervase> * "Cisco Systems, Inc."
> Gervase> * "the libjpeg-turbo Project"
> Gervase> * "the Motorola, Inc." (!)
> Gervase> * "Adobe Systems, Network Resonance"
> Gervase> * "Parakey Inc"
> Gervase> * "Apple Computer, Inc. ("Apple")"
> Gervase> * "the copyright holders"
> Gervase> * "Network Resonance, Inc."
> Gervase> * "the company"
> Gervase> * "Redis"
> Gervase> * "Apple Computer, Inc. ("Apple") or The Mozilla Foundation
> ("Mozilla")"
> Gervase> * "The NetBSD Foundation"
> Gervase> * "the psutil authors"
> Gervase> * "the Institute"
> Gervase> * "the Eclipse Foundation, Inc."
> Gervase> * "the Cisco Systems, Inc." (!)
> Gervase> * "the author(s)"
> Gervase> * the Xiph.org Foundation"
> Gervase> ... and several more.
>
> Gervase> Disclaimer section:
>
> Gervase> Much less variation here, the first two being by far the most
> common:
>
> Gervase> * "THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS"
> Gervase> * "THE AUTHOR"
> Gervase> * "THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS"
> Gervase> * "Google Inc."
> Gervase> * "KTH AND ITS CONTRIBUTORS"
> Gervase> * "The Android Open Source Project"
> Gervase> * "THE AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS"
> Gervase> * "DAVID YOUNG"
> Gervase> * "THE PROJECT AND CONTRIBUTORS"
> Gervase> * "APPLE AND ITS CONTRIBUTORS"
> Gervase> * "SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC."
> Gervase> * "APPLE, MOZILLA AND THEIR CONTRIBUTORS"
> Gervase> * "THE NETBSD FOUNDATION, INC"
> Gervase> * "THE INSTITUTE AND CONTRIBUTORS"
>
> Gervase> As far as I can tell, other than the substitution of names on
> Gervase> occasion, the disclaimer is otherwise identical. And there is very
> Gervase> little variation in the other text too.
>
> Gervase> Bullets:
>
> Gervase> * None
> Gervase> * "1."
> Gervase> * "a)"
> Gervase> * "-"
> Gervase> * "*"
> Gervase> * In one case, 1), 2) and nothing!
> Gervase> * In another, 1), 2) and "-"!
> Gervase> * In another, nothing, nothing and "-"!
> Gervase> * In another, all the paras are run together
>
> Gervase> Numbers seem to be the most common.
>
> Gervase> Gerv
>
>
> --
> Daniel M. German "An intellectual is someone whose
>Albert Camus -> mind watches itself. "
> http://turingmachine.org/
> http://silvernegative.com/
> dmg (at) uvic (dot) ca
> replace (at) with @ and (dot) with .
>
>
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Re: [License-discuss] Boilerplate license text for permissive licenses?
On 27/11/12 19:28, D M German wrote:
Why don't you try the tool we developed. It is a bit hacky, but it will
help you do what you are doing automatically.
http://github.com/dmgerman/ninka
Hi dmg,
I did come across ninka in my research, and tried it out, but I couldn't
really get it to do the right thing for me. :-| And it left loads of
temporary files all over the place.
As I mentioned in the previous message, what is the code you are looking
at? I can run the tool myself and give you the resulting data.
Well, it's the B2G tree, but with some bits excluded because they are
test code and because we aren't shipping them.
Following these instructions up to just before the point where you
actually run a build command ("build.sh") will get the code for you.
Beware, it's big.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gecko/Preparing_for_your_first_B2G_build
Running your tool over that would give a first approximation.
But, AIUI, your tool doesn't do the "detecting licenses which are 'the
same'" and copyright amalgamation bits which my tool now does.
Gerv
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Re: [License-discuss] Boilerplate license text for permissive licenses?
On Tue, 27 Nov 2012, Matthew Flaschen wrote: > But I don't see how you can remove the placeholder from BSD 3-Clause > while still having it be the same license. The original says, "Neither > the name of the University nor the names of its contributors" You have > to put something in place of University. It commonly has "name of the author" I also had the fun scripting to parse out the different licenses (and convert to a LaTeX format for 68 printed pages) for a product I sell. It has over 100 different BSD and MIT licenses and 26 advertising clauses "This product includes software developed ..." I just realized that I listed different cases (like "author" versus "Author") as different licenses too, but I think that is only a few. ___ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] Boilerplate license text for permissive licenses?
On 26/11/12 23:44, Luis Villa wrote:
I wonder if there is an easy way to visualize the various changes you
have in your data set, to see where people agreed/disagreed/edited,
outside the obvious changes. Daniel German, cc'd, may have already
tackled this, or have other ideas along these lines.
I don't have an automated way. I gave myself 10 minutes to do it by
hand, and the results are as follows:
:
* "the author"
* "the above-listed copyright holder(s)"
* "Yahoo! Inc.", followed by "nor the names of YUI's contributors"
* "the copyright holder"
* "Google"
* "the Eclipse Foundation, Inc."
* "the University"
* "Google Inc."
* "the Xiph.org Foundation nor Pinknoise Productions Ltd"
* "TransGaming Inc., Google Inc., 3DLabs Inc. Ltd.,"
* "the David Beazley or Dabeaz LLC" (!)
* "the Jython Developers"
* "KTH"
* "The Android Open Source Project"
* Rewording: "The names of the authors may not be used to endorse..."
* Rewording: "The names of the author may not be used to endorse..."
* "David Young"
* "the project"
* "Cisco Systems, Inc."
* "the libjpeg-turbo Project"
* "the Motorola, Inc." (!)
* "Adobe Systems, Network Resonance"
* "Parakey Inc"
* "Apple Computer, Inc. ("Apple")"
* "the copyright holders"
* "Network Resonance, Inc."
* "the company"
* "Redis"
* "Apple Computer, Inc. ("Apple") or The Mozilla Foundation ("Mozilla")"
* "The NetBSD Foundation"
* "the psutil authors"
* "the Institute"
* "the Eclipse Foundation, Inc."
* "the Cisco Systems, Inc." (!)
* "the author(s)"
* the Xiph.org Foundation"
... and several more.
Disclaimer section:
Much less variation here, the first two being by far the most common:
* "THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS"
* "THE AUTHOR"
* "THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS"
* "Google Inc."
* "KTH AND ITS CONTRIBUTORS"
* "The Android Open Source Project"
* "THE AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS"
* "DAVID YOUNG"
* "THE PROJECT AND CONTRIBUTORS"
* "APPLE AND ITS CONTRIBUTORS"
* "SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC."
* "APPLE, MOZILLA AND THEIR CONTRIBUTORS"
* "THE NETBSD FOUNDATION, INC"
* "THE INSTITUTE AND CONTRIBUTORS"
As far as I can tell, other than the substitution of names on occasion,
the disclaimer is otherwise identical. And there is very little
variation in the other text too.
Bullets:
* None
* "1."
* "a)"
* "-"
* "*"
* In one case, 1), 2) and nothing!
* In another, 1), 2) and "-"!
* In another, nothing, nothing and "-"!
* In another, all the paras are run together
Numbers seem to be the most common.
Gerv
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Re: [License-discuss] Boilerplate license text for permissive licenses?
Hi Larry, On 27/11/12 04:57, Lawrence Rosen wrote: Consider the hapless corporate attorney who is forced to review hundreds of proprietary software licenses when authorizing the distribution or sale/purchase of his company's software products. Each of those proprietary licenses may contain restrictions on transfer; unique indemnity and warranty provisions; attribution requirements or prohibitions; etc. My sympathy for such hapless individuals is real, albeit tempered by the fact that as a reward for taking on such onerous work they probably earn at least triple what I do ;-P But once you've done your variant-gathering, will you recommend that everyone else do the same for their own open source software as Mozilla will do for Firefox OS? That's a lot of work to recommend for others to do. Fortunately, I have a script which can analyse a source tree and produce the necessary output for inclusion with software. That would seem to be a waste of time considering the infinitesimally tiny risk that one of those "variant" licensors would sue you for breach for taking the easy way out -- such as: "This software includes contributions under one or more variants of the official BSD and MIT license versions published at www.opensource.org. Mozilla has chosen not to publish those individual variant licenses along with this distribution, although we are disclosing its source code as those licenses require." That's an interesting recommendation, although one that (as far as I know) has never been taken up by any distributor of aggregated software. I am certainly not competent to judge whether, for example, the addition of an extra word to the disclaimer has legal effect or not, and if by instead referencing a license with slightly different wording we might upset someone who included that word for a reason. Also, these licenses don't require disclosure of source code. software. Those licensors can't sue you anyway unless they register their copyrights, which is unlikely to have happened for such works. Damages in such a lawsuit would be minimal at worst. For a company that can afford to swat away any such nuisance lawsuits, taking this easy way out may be worth the risk, unless your lawyer tells you that no risk is ever worth taking. "Mozilla ignores clear provisions of open source licenses; says 'well, we probably won't get sued, so who cares?'". A great headline for Slashdot. Gerv ___ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] Boilerplate license text for permissive licenses?
On 27/11/12 08:22, Matthew Flaschen wrote: But I don't see how you can remove the placeholder from BSD 3-Clause while still having it be the same license. The original says, "Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors" You have to put something in place of University. The common solution here is to instead put some words like "The copyright holder" or "the copyright holder or any other contributors" or "any of the authors". There are several variants (this being my point) and in this case we might like to seek an opinion on whether any of them is preferable to the others. Gerv ___ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] Boilerplate license text for permissive licenses?
On 11/26/2012 05:55 AM, Gervase Markham wrote: > The BSD2Clause version does not have that, obviously. It's noteworthy > that there are 2x as many 3-clause variants in the B2G codebase as there > are 2-clause variants. I don't think there's a good reason BSD 2-Clause has at the top (it's not used in the template). It should be removed. But I don't see how you can remove the placeholder from BSD 3-Clause while still having it be the same license. The original says, "Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors" You have to put something in place of University. I agree with providing a text copyable version (* for the list bullets should be fine). Matt Flaschen ___ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
Re: [License-discuss] Boilerplate license text for permissive licenses?
Hi Gerv, Consider the hapless corporate attorney who is forced to review hundreds of proprietary software licenses when authorizing the distribution or sale/purchase of his company's software products. Each of those proprietary licenses may contain restrictions on transfer; unique indemnity and warranty provisions; attribution requirements or prohibitions; etc. I consider your task with these BSD/MIT open source variants to be simple in comparison. FOSS is usually simpler than proprietary. But once you've done your variant-gathering, will you recommend that everyone else do the same for their own open source software as Mozilla will do for Firefox OS? That's a lot of work to recommend for others to do. That would seem to be a waste of time considering the infinitesimally tiny risk that one of those "variant" licensors would sue you for breach for taking the easy way out -- such as: "This software includes contributions under one or more variants of the official BSD and MIT license versions published at www.opensource.org. Mozilla has chosen not to publish those individual variant licenses along with this distribution, although we are disclosing its source code as those licenses require." This would be, after all, an entirely reasonable minor breach of what is a weak BSD or MIT license requirement, imposed by unknown contributors long ago, to publish the actual license text somewhere prominently along with the software. Those licensors can't sue you anyway unless they register their copyrights, which is unlikely to have happened for such works. Damages in such a lawsuit would be minimal at worst. For a company that can afford to swat away any such nuisance lawsuits, taking this easy way out may be worth the risk, unless your lawyer tells you that no risk is ever worth taking. I'm quite sanguine about minimal license breaches in open source situations where we can reasonably assume that we're serving the authors' will anyway. Some of those old license requirements are no longer appropriate for modern software delivery mechanisms. Other opinions may vary. /Larry P.S. Egads! A lawyer advising breaches of the express (and unreasonable) terms of very old FOSS licenses!!! Fortunately, this email is not legal advice to you. :-) Lawrence Rosen Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm (www.rosenlaw.com) 3001 King Ranch Rd., Ukiah, CA 95482 Office: 707-485-1242 -Original Message- From: Gervase Markham [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, November 26, 2012 2:55 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [License-discuss] Boilerplate license text for permissive licenses? Dear license-discuss, Short version: can the OSI please consider providing generic, appropriately wrapped, plain-text, copy-and-pasteable versions of the MIT, BSD (2 and 3 clause) and HPND licenses, linked from that license's main license page, to cut down on license proliferation? Long version: I am currently attempting to make sure Firefox OS complies with the open source licenses of all the bits of code we are using. As you can understand, an entire operating system is quite a lot of code. I have written a script to analyse the codebase and extract all of the MIT, BSD and HPND license blocks in it. Each of these licenses requires the license text to be reproduced "in other materials provided with the distribution", or some similar words. My script counts as "the same" the ones where the differences are merely whitespace-based. We were advised that if two license blocks differ by more than that, e.g. if they mention a specific person or organization in the disclaimer, then they are "different" and cannot be merged. Here's a count of the number of different variants in my current draft licensing file, by license type: BSD2Clause: 30 BSD3Clause: 55 BSD4Clause: 12 MIT:23 HPND: 42 In other words, we will have to reproduce at least 160 different but similar license blocks in the documentation for Firefox OS. Some of this is unavoidable; the MIT and BSD licenses have changed over time, and some of this code is very old. Some of these differences may indeed have some legal effect. However, it seems that sometimes, people might be copying and pasting from the OSI website, but then they have to fill in the blanks and/or replace HTML-based formatting such as bullet points, and everyone does it slightly differently. For example, for bullets, we have "*" vs "a)" vs "1." vs "-" vs " ". I have seen BSD 3-clause variants, otherwise identical to the OSI version, with all of these bullet types. The trouble is, without getting into very detailed heuristics, simple moves like saying "OK, apostrophe, hyphen, period and digits don't count for determining license sameness" start to run the risk of removing significant differences. And the text says you have to reproduce "this license notice", after all. The MIT license on opensource.org is good, because it can simply be co
Re: [License-discuss] Boilerplate license text for permissive licenses?
On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 2:55 AM, Gervase Markham wrote: > Dear license-discuss, > > Short version: can the OSI please consider providing generic, appropriately > wrapped, plain-text, copy-and-pasteable versions of the MIT, BSD (2 and 3 > clause) and HPND licenses, linked from that license's main license page, to > cut down on license proliferation? > > Long version: I am currently attempting to make sure Firefox OS complies > with the open source licenses of all the bits of code we are using. As you > can understand, an entire operating system is quite a lot of code. > > I have written a script to analyse the codebase and extract all of the MIT, > BSD and HPND license blocks in it. Each of these licenses requires the > license text to be reproduced "in other materials provided with the > distribution", or some similar words. My script counts as "the same" the > ones where the differences are merely whitespace-based. We were advised that > if two license blocks differ by more than that, e.g. if they mention a > specific person or organization in the disclaimer, then they are "different" > and cannot be merged. Let me preempt those on the list who disagree with this: I don't think it's a very worthwhile discussion; it is understood that people have different interpretations of this language, and no amount of discussion here will change that. > Here's a count of the number of different variants in my current draft > licensing file, by license type: > > BSD2Clause: 30 > BSD3Clause: 55 > BSD4Clause: 12 > MIT:23 > HPND: 42 > > In other words, we will have to reproduce at least 160 different but similar > license blocks in the documentation for Firefox OS. > > Some of this is unavoidable; the MIT and BSD licenses have changed over > time, and some of this code is very old. Some of these differences may > indeed have some legal effect. > > However, it seems that sometimes, people might be copying and pasting from > the OSI website, but then they have to fill in the blanks and/or replace > HTML-based formatting such as bullet points, and everyone does it slightly > differently. For example, for bullets, we have "*" vs "a)" vs "1." vs "-" vs > " ". I have seen BSD 3-clause variants, otherwise identical to the OSI > version, with all of these bullet types. > > The trouble is, without getting into very detailed heuristics, simple moves > like saying "OK, apostrophe, hyphen, period and digits don't count for > determining license sameness" start to run the risk of removing significant > differences. And the text says you have to reproduce "this license notice", > after all. > > The MIT license on opensource.org is good, because it can simply be copied > and pasted as-is: http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT Accordingly, a lot of > uses of the MIT license in the codebase are that exact license. > > However, the BSD3Clause version has a placeholder in clause 3 for > , which means that everyone who copies and pastes it will > create a new license variant when they replace that part. > http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause > Whether there are other variations or not, this is a very common way of > creating a whole new license. > > The BSD2Clause version does not have that, obviously. It's noteworthy that > there are 2x as many 3-clause variants in the B2G codebase as there are > 2-clause variants. > > Although it's now deprecated, and so maybe not used much, the HPND is even > worse: > http://opensource.org/licenses/HPND > There are so many optional bits there that anyone attempting to use that > license based on the OSI copy is almost bound to produce something unique! > > We can't prevent people from modifying license texts. But we can avoid > _requiring_ them to do so! Can the OSI help with this? Seems like a reasonable request to me. I don't see any obvious reason offhand why our 3-clause and HPND variants couldn't be fixed in the same way our MIT and 2-clause "templates" are. But there would need to be (ideally not by me, for time reasons) a more detailed review of a specific set of changes. I do also wonder if anyone here has the historical memory to explain why this is. I wonder if there is an easy way to visualize the various changes you have in your data set, to see where people agreed/disagreed/edited, outside the obvious changes. Daniel German, cc'd, may have already tackled this, or have other ideas along these lines. Luis ___ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
