On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Luke Mewburn wrote:

>       I, myself, have been at the receiving end of an aggressively
>       worded demand to change the license terms on code I wrote, with
>       scant justification to the rationale let alone the benefits of
>       the change. I was not Impressed.

Having seen what Chris Demetriou went through a few years back
trying to figure out the licensing of NetBSD, this kind of thing no
longer surprises me. Let's face it, it's a nightmare trying to ship
a commercial product that includes substantial chunks of NetBSD and
complies with all the licences.

> 	It turns out that clause 2 is just as, if not more, onerous
> 	than clause 3, because most products ship with documentation,
> 	but not all derived products will mention the specific
> 	functionality obtained from the NetBSD source.

It's not quite as bad, because you can just stash a doc file somewhere
containing all of the license headers, but yeah, it's still a PITA.

> 	Thus, if I was two remove two clauses from a BSD license
> 	with the intent to make my code "freer" and "easier to use",
> 	I'd be considering removing clauses 2 & 3, not clauses 3 & 4.

Having looked at it again, I agree with this.

Then again, I've given up; I now place most of the "free"code I write
into the public domain. I'm told that this may come back to haut me one
day, but whatever....

>     d)	One method to ease the workload of third parties is to
> 	build & maintain a "license register" of every source file
> 	in the system, and provide tools that will display the
> 	copyright & license conditions for the requested files.

Nightmare, and even just keeping track of what files you took stuff from
is a lot of work.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.NetBSD.org
    Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC