ESR: > I will now express an opinion: It is *highly unlikely* that a court will ever > find any change of open-source license actionable, with one possible > exception: changes between reciprocal (GPL-style) and non-reciprocal > licenses. But from a court's point of view the difference between (say) BSD > and Apache would be very much de minimis non curat lex.
I'll disagree with you on that *specific* point, even though I'm not a lawyer either. Many organizations specifically choose the Apache-2.0 license because they want the patent statements that are notably *not* in BSD-3-Clause and BSD-2-Clause. Given the potential costs of patent litigation (which sometimes look more like extortion), and their belief that these Apache-2.0 clauses will help address those costs, I think they could make a great argument that this is *not* a de minimis difference. In short: I would not just s/Apache-2.0/BSD-2-Clause/ on software I didn't have all the rights to :-). That said, I *would* agree that there are licenses that really aren't any different from a legal perspective. For example, I don't know of any *real* legal differences between Rob Landley's 0BSD and the Unlicense. However, I think there's value in trying to faithfully capture whatever legal text originally came from the originator. If nothing else, I think courts would generally look favorably on anyone who can show that they tried to faithfully retain the license information.... and would be suspicious of someone who just blithely changed the license text of material copyrighted by someone else. Especially since the original text is easy to keep. Even if in the end it's okay, time is precious; the less time I spend in court trying to justify something, the better :-). It's easy to keep the exact license text, so let's do it. --- David A. Wheeler _______________________________________________ Spdx-tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-tech
