Fair

<Copyright Information>

Usage of the works is permitted provided that this instrument is retained with the works, so that any entity that uses the works is notified of this instrument.

DISCLAIMER: THE WORKS ARE WITHOUT WARRANTY.

Can, cannot & must

(adapted from TLDRLegal)
✅ You can use the software for commercial purposes.
✅ You can grant/extend a license to the software.
✅ You can distribute original or modified (derivative) works.
✅ You can modify the software and create derivatives.
✅ You can change software's name if modified/distributed.
❌ You cannot place warranty on the software licensed.
❗ You must include the full text of license in modified software.

Background

The license was written and published by James William Pye on 2004. The original discussion and motivation behind it can be found at the following mailing list archives:

Short, simple and permissive

I'm a typical programmer that enjoys working with open source software. And most of my open source work are small modules (or packages if you will).

I always found silly to use a thoroughly legal statement for those. Sometimes the license can be bigger than the source code itself.

For small things I want a small license. A license which is:

A dead license

With that mindset I went to the OSI approved licenses and, for my surprise, I found such license.

A license that consisted of two paragraphs: the first stating that the license should be distributed alongside the work, and a second stating that the work has no warranties.

But it was embarrassingly dead. I didn't find a single thing out there using it and on the OSI page about the license there was a broken reference link.

I can fix that broken link

So I've talked with OSI and James (the author).

James “original purpose and curiosity” of “sentence of a vague legalese” is “long gone”.

OSI still warned me for eventual issues that could arise for using such permissive license (just as the folks on debian-legal mailing list), but they also kindly let me replace that broken link.

And that's what this page is about.