[Toybox] Pending tweak to license text.

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Tue Mar 12 22:23:10 PDT 2013


Nobody but me is likely to care, but I'd like to simplify the first  
paragraph from the current:

   Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for  
any
   purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the  
above
   copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

To just say:

   Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for  
any
   purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.

Reasoning: it was never my intent to require anybody to copy license  
text into another project if they cut and pasted something out of  
toybox. The "permission for any purpose" is as close to public domain  
as you can get in our current screwed up legal system without making  
people uncomfortable the _other_ way. (Besides, my initial reading of  
that was "all copies of the source code" but that's not what it says,  
and somebody pointed out that Android has "show license text" options  
because paranoid lawyers think that sort of thing applies to the BINARY  
version, which is nuts.)

I'm not changing it this release, but in case anybody was going to  
object I thought I'd post it here for a bit first so I can remove your  
code if it really matters to you. This version is still  
outgoing-compatible with the old version (code that says the new thing  
can give code to a project that says the old thing, whether it could  
receive it depends on how paranoid your lawyers are).

Rob



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