[dgl]

> This is different from a truly free license like BSD or MIT which grant unlimited redistribution and use.

Not "unlimited"; they do require a copyright notice. An interesting license for small pieces of code like this is 0BSD[1], it is (despite the name) a small modification of the ISC license[2] that drops the requirement to include the copyright notice. The advantage being for small pieces of code it means you don't have the proliferation of copyright lines that in theory should be copied even into binary distributions of the code.

[1]: https://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html [2]: Compare 0BSD with: https://spdx.org/licenses/ISC.html

[kazinator]

Do you recommend removing the copyright notice from a 0BSD licensed work before passing it onto someone else?

Or else, what exactly is the use case?

[dgl]

The use case is not wanting people to care, in theory if you license a small code sample under ISC / MIT / normal BSD, etc. licenses then someone has to include the copyright statement in "all copies" (ISC, or slightly different wording with the others).

With 0BSD there's no need to remove the copyright notice, but there's no need to proliferate the text.

As mentioned in https://landley.net/toybox/license.html the result of correctly complying with this can be crazy things like: https://github.com/android/platform_system_core/blob/fd4c6b0...

The advantage of 0BSD is it appears to be the most accepted OSI license without the attribution requirement (given as you mention CC0 isn't accepted by Fedora, Unlicense isn't allowed by Google). Usual not being a lawyer applies, this is just my observations.

[kazinator]

That file is just stupid; most of the licenses have common bits that can be algebraically factored out.

There is no need to have two copies of a license which differ only in this:

  Copyright (c) 1987, 1993
     The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.

vs:

  Copyright (c) 1987, 1993, 1994
     The Regents of the University of California.  All rights reserved.

The second one subsumes the first one.

Secondly, it's obvious that what that file consists of is licenses pulled from individual source files. But doesn't indicate which source files. It mentions various author names, but doesn't say who wrote which file.

This conglomerated file is uninformative and serves no purpose.

What you want is to just leave the original notices in the source files and have a concise summary about what.

  This project uses:
  * BSD-licensed code by Jeffrey Mogul in subdir/foo;
  * BSD-licensed code by David Hitz in subdir/bar;
  ...
  consult the individual license headers or subdirectory LICENSE files for the exact licensing details.

[dgl]

Unfortunately that's not what the license says.

> Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright

> notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the

> documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

You do need to pull out the license headers into somewhere to present to the end user, for binary distributions.

Also the Apache license explicitly mentions a file called "NOTICE", which, again, I'm not a lawyer, but I believe is how the Apache license and some BSD licenses are able to be compatible here. Your proposed summary therefore doesn't make the licenses compatible.

Hence 0BSD is a way to not further contribute to this problem.

[fanf2]

You can redistribute the code as is. You can copy and paste the code or any part of it without having to copy the licence. You can incorporate it into a project with a different licence and you don’t have to worry about preserving the original licence.

Just, do whatever is most convenient for you.