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Re: [avr-libc-dev] avr-libc license audit


From: E. Weddington
Subject: Re: [avr-libc-dev] avr-libc license audit
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 15:51:40 -0600
User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.7.3 (Windows/20040803)

Marek Michalkiewicz wrote:

On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 02:56:02PM -0600, E. Weddington wrote:
The problem is that the original LICENSE file said that avr-libc is licensed with
"Modified BSD license (no advertising clause)"
There are many files in there that are *not licensed this way*, only having 2 clauses and not including the "no advertising" clause.

Poorly defined operator precedence ;) - it was meant to be read as:

(no (advertising clause))

not as:

((no advertising) clause)

where the "advertising clause" is the one which was removed from the
original (4-clause) BSD license.  The problem (full-page ads, etc.)
is explained in http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html .


Thanks for the link, and sorry for the confusion.

Some time ago, I chose the 3-clause BSD license as a fairly simple,
liberal and standard one.  Later, BSD people made it even simpler by
removing another clause (I guess it was a problem for someone again...
licensing issues are evil), and I have no problem with that, so I
started using the 2-clause license in newer files (and probably
forgot to update some of the older ones).

The "no advertising" is only marginally restrictive:

 * Neither the name of the copyright holders nor the names of
   contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived
   from this software without specific prior written permission.

It only restricts the user of avr-libc so they don't go off and say "Marek Michalkiewicz endorses the use of this product! :-) Buy it!". This is a fairly reaonable restriction for users.

No problem for me either way - it was never my intent to add more
restrictions, as they only make things more complicated for everyone
(especially if one program contains code with different licenses: you
have to check each license if it is compatible with all others, grrr...).

So, then do I have your permission to change the files that you hold a copyright on to include the "no adverstising" clause? If yes, could you CC avr-libc-dev?

Yes.  But, you could just as well do the reverse: ask authors who
hold copyright on files with 3-clause license if they agree to
remove that one clause (I agree, if I forgot to remove that clause
from any of the files I wrote).  It's up to you.  Sorry for not
speaking up about this earlier (I'm overworked as usual).



Thanks for the permission.
I know it's a hassle trying to get everything to one agreeable license, but we've had inquiries about the license and I would prefer just "putting this issue to bed". In discussing this issue on avr-libc-dev, Joerg Wunsch didn't seem to care either way, and Ted Roth and I prefer to have the extra "no endorse" clause. See these:
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/avr-libc-dev/2004-10/msg00064.html>
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/avr-libc-dev/2004-10/msg00069.html>

Thanks again.
Eric





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