Tonight, I was discussing with some guys to re-license a package I wrote some time ago, JDBM. It’s an interesting little Java package, used by some other open source projects, and for some reason I slapped a home-made custom license on it.

I think I’m getting really old - I have been discussing open source licensing since roughly 1990, and I just don’t care anymore. Whether JDBM is licensed under Apache or MIT, who cares? It is open source - open source is a spirit, an idea, not some bit of legalese.

Anyway, partly tongue-in-cheek I responded with an open source meta license:

(c) whoever…

I/We license this software to you under any license that has been deemed Open Source Definition compliant by the Open Source Institute. So please go to http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ and pick your license. Have a nice day.

Re-reading it, it doesn’t sound too bad. I think I’m actually going to use it on my next project

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 22nd, 2006 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Software Development, Digital Rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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