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by heavensteeth 635 days ago
> Well, although SPDX counts 665 licences, there really just 3 main kinds:

> 1. licences with no restrictions (like MIT)

> 2. licences that require you credit the original author ("attribution" licences, including the Apache Licence)

> 3. licences that require you credit the original author and that derivative works have the same licence ("copyleft"/"share-alike" licences like the GPL)

MIT requires attribution, doesn't it? MIT (permissive) / MPL (non-viral copyleft) / AGPL (viral copyleft) seems like a better grouping to me; I rarely find myself reaching for any other licenses.

I do wish there were a shorter copyleft license though. I appreciate how transparent and readable MIT is.

2 comments

The author must have meant something like Zero-Clause BSD, equivalent to public domain in the US. https://opensource.org/license/0bsd
The MS-RL is still the shortest, clearest copyleft license I'm aware of it. It is nearly as readable as the MIT. https://opensource.org/license/ms-rl-html

It's just weird that it has "Microsoft" in the name. Though I suppose not much weirder than MIT license being named after a University or BSD license being named after a University's Unix distribution.

Also even Microsoft doesn't use the MS-RL much anymore having standardized more on MPL where they use copyleft licenses and Apache License most everywhere else.

> You may license other files that are entirely your own work and do not contain code from the software under any terms you choose.

This part confuses me a bit, as the distinction between storing all the code in the same file versus dividing it into separate files is fairly arbitrary. What happens if you have 3 files in your project, one of which contains licensed code, and then zip them together into a single archive for distribution?