Copyright (C) 2006 by Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any
purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND THE AUTHOR DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES
WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR
ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES
WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN
ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF
OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
The text of the above license is included in the file LICENSE in the source.
As with CC0,
unlicense, and wtfpl,
the intent is to place the licensed material into the public domain,
which after decades of FUD (such as the time OSI's ex-lawyer compared
placing code into the public domain to
abandoning trash by the
side of a highway) is considered somehow unsafe. (But if some random third
party
takes
public domain code and slaps some other license on it, then it's fine.)
To work around this perception, the above license is a standard 2-clause BSD
license (the from OpenBSD)
minus the half sentence
requiring text copied verbatim into derived works. If OpenBSD's 2BSD is
ok, then our 0BSD should be ok,
despite being equivalent to placing code in the public domain.
Modifying the license in this way avoids the hole android toolbox fell into where
33 copies of BSD license text
were concatenated together when copyright dates changed, or the strange
solution the busybox developers used to resolve tension between GPLv2's "no
additional restrictions" and BSD's "you must include this large hunk of text"
by sticking the two licenses at
opposite ends of the file and hoping nobody
noticed.
This "stuttering" is the common failure mode of public domain adjacent
licenses (BSD, Apache, and so on) when used in combination or in long-lived
projects. How one would enforce such a multiply concatenated result in court is
an open question. (How one would be sure they weren't exposed to liability due
to a disagreement over the definition of "supporting" materials is another
fun gotcha.) Public domain equivalent licenses avoid this problem
entirely: different license text can collapse together because derived works
are not tied to a specific wording of a specific license, and does not
place bookeeping requirements on the recipient. The permission
grant exists upstream, and the internet makes that available to everybody;
how or if to propogate that permission grant into other projects
using portions of this code is left up to the recipient. Having a LICENSE
file in your source tarball is still a very good idea, but the license itself
requiring it is subtly problematic, so ours doesn't.