A group of lawyers have banded together to try to classify and rank
all free software licenses, and during that work they came up with a
list of checkboxes. None of the licenses reviewed checked all boxes,
so they went and made a "model license" that would live up to all
their expectations.
A brief story of that work is at
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2019/03/09/Deprecation-Notice.html .
The Blue Oak Model License 1.0 (the BOML1) is a very short, very
non-legalese permissive license with a patent clause, and the authors
claim that it covers all relevant bases. The spirit of the endeavour
is very similar to the spirit behind copyleft-next:
> Blue Oak starts with a summary of its purpose, a built-in TL;DR. You should read the whole license, because it’s easy and it matters. Blue Oak wants to be understood.
Ok, so that's the background on what the BOML1 is. Now:
We have mentioned before on the list how the sunset clause in
copyleft-next really gives rise to a permissive-next license, which is
copyleft-next with some conditions removed or disabled.
If the legal theory and the prose of the BOML1 are good, does it make
sense for permissive-next to deviate from BOML1 at all? Or should
copyleft-next actually be BOML1 + copyleft provisions + sunset clause?
And vice versa, if permissive-next is better in some way than BOML1,
shouldn't they want to know about it and incorporate the improvements
in BOML2?
The board of Blue Oak are Heather Meeker, Kyle Mitchell and Luis
Villa. I think Villa is a member of this mailing list? He has forked
copyleft-next on github, so he knows about the project for sure. :-)
--
/c
