Re: [MinGW-dvlpr] MinGW license

[Greg C. <gch...@sb...>]

On 2010-07-02 17:01Z, Earnie wrote:
> How about the following text as a license for the runtime?  We'll have 
> to wait to hear from Anders on the w32api.

If he agrees to, say, an MIT license for w32api, then it'd be nice
to use that for mingwrt as well.

>  I copied the unlicense.org 
> text and added a paragraph above the disclaimer which I think better 
> accomplishes the requirement of countries that do not recognize the 
> public domain license as legal.

Let me offer a cautionary tale. I went through years of negotiation
with my employer (not a software company) over some GPL code I had
written. Their "intellectual property expert" reviewed the license
and presented many objections and ideas for "improving" it. I was
ultimately able to get senior management to override this nonsense
largely because the GPL is so widely respected and used. If it's
accepted by companies like IBM who've certainly had genuine experts
scrutinize it, then the supposed objections raised in house are
unlikely to have any actual merit.

[BTW, I'm not saying this is my *current* employer.]

I probably could have succeeded with the BSD or MIT licenses, for
the same reasons. But licenses that are less well known and less
well drafted don't have that benefit--and I really think this one
is poorly drafted. For example, the "unlicense" says:

> In jurisdictions that recognize copyright laws, the author or authors
> of this software dedicate any and all copyright interest in the
> software to the public domain.

They probably intend that to mean jurisdictions like the US and
unlike France. But that's not what it does mean, because France
most certainly does recognize copyright laws. France meets the
criterion preceding the comma, but doesn't permit the rest of
the sentence to operate AIUI. YANAL, AFAIK, but the paragraph
you added is better than this.

I could pick at other details of this thing, but the real point
is that it's safer to go with a finely-crafted license that's
in widespread use and has stood the test of time. I would suggest
dual-licensing everything: provide PD as well as either MIT or
(2- or 3-clause) BSD, and let the user choose.