[Toybox] 0BSD license and standards bodies.

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Fri Nov 2 21:32:31 PDT 2018


Just an FYI on a thing I've been doing behind the scenes:

Toybox has been under the Zero Clause BSD license since 2013, which is the
OpenBSD suggested template license with half a sentence removed. In 2015,
shortly after Android merged toybox, Samsung asked me to submit this License for
SPDX approval, which I did:

  https://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html

A few months after SPDX published its approval, somebody submitted the same
license to OSI under a different name, and when OSI realized it had made a
mistake they had no procedure to officially acknowledge that or undo it.

OSI's mistake didn't bother toybox, but it inconvenienced other people who
wanted to use the license for their own projects:

  https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/issues/464

So I've had a todo item to try to clear up the confusion for a while now, and I
finally got around to formally asking OSI to undo its mistake a little over a
month ago:


http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-September/003519.html

And when that discussion petered out I poked them again:


http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003581.html

There are a _lot_ of links from and replies to those three threads, but the
debate's petered out again and my current understanding is the OSI board members
will vote 60 days after the initial post (which would be somewhere around the
end of this month):


http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/003724.html

This doesn't directly affect toybox (we were _asked_ to submit to SPDX, nobody
mentioned OSI, they inserted themselves into this and it took me 3 years to get
around to formally asking them to stop), but I thought I should probably mention
it here.

Rob


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