MirOS Licence
| Author | The MirOS Project |
|---|---|
| Latest version | CVS r1.19[1] – can be considered the first version |
| Published | 11 December 2006 |
| SPDX identifier | MirOS |
| Debian FSG compatible | Yes |
| FSF approved | Yes |
| OSI approved | Yes |
| GPL compatible | Yes |
| Copyleft | No |
| Linking from code with a different licence | Yes |
| Website | HTML version, UTF-8 plain text version |
The MirOS Licence is a free content licence (for software and other free cultural works such as graphical, literal, musical, …) originated at The MirOS Project for their own publications because the ISC license used by OpenBSD was perceived as having problems with wording[2] and too America centric. It has strong roots in the UCB BSD licence and the Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer with a focus on modern, explicit, legible language and usability by European (except UK), specifically German, authors (while not hindering adoption by authors from other legislations). It is a permissive (“BSD/MIT-style”) licence.
Another novelty is that this licence was specified for any kind of copyrightable work from the start; as such, it does not only meet the Open Source Definition and Debian Free Software Guidelines but also the Open Knowledge Definition and, in fact, has been approved by the OKFN long before OSI did[1].
The licence has not seen formal legal review, but received input[3] from ifrOSS’ Dr. Till Jaeger and is listed on their licence centre webpages as well.
The Free Software Foundation has not formally added the licence as either Free Software or Free Documentation to their pages but accepted it informally in private eMail, and their software directory has a category for it.
It was later seen that some countries have special laws for databases, which should be considered in a later version of this licence, if any, to keep it as generally usable as possible. Patent and trademark law was intentionally not addressed, only copyright law, but the general idea is to have one “copycenter” style licence (more specifically, one that says do with it whatever you want, just don’t pretend it’s not mine and don’t sue me) for everything. This was partially prompted by the dilemma of people using the GPL for documentation because the GFDL is unfree, but the GPL (and all other traditional Open Source licences) was not suited for it.
External links
- HTML version of the licence text
- UTF-8 plain text version
- CVSweb of the master copy of the licence text (note: license.template was the ISC license used by OpenBSD, licence.template is the one written by Thorsten Glaser and developed for MirOS)
- ifrOSS licence centre (English) listing
- Open Definition (OKFN) listing
- OSI (Open Source Initiative) listing
- Freedom Defined listing
- Fedora Project listing
References
- ^ a b CVSweb revision log of the master copy of the text – r1.19 contains the final version of the text, although 1.28 is the current one; the licence has no successor as of now, hence version numbering is not strictly needed
- ^ Part 1 and Part 2 of NetBSD developer Hubert Feyrer’s findings
- ^ OSI mailing list posting, MirOS mailing list posting