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Re: Netbiff license



> Further discussion with upstream created this short license:
> 
>     Netbiff may be redistributed in any form without restriction.
>     Netbiff comes with NO WARRANTY.
> 
> Since this is a new license I'm asking debian-legal for completeness if
> there could be any problems with this licensing? It should be DFSG free
> as far as I can understand, right?

Not quite.  The problem is that copyright law ASSumes that you don't give 
permission to create modified versions unless you explicitly do.  You would 
need something more like this:

Netbiff may be modified in any way.
Netbiff may be redistributed in any form, modified or unmodified, without 
restriction.
Netbiff comes with NO WARRANTY.

...and beware of writing your own license.  :-)

--
You want a public-domain-equivalent license.  There are several ways to do 
this.  Since you really do want it to be public domain, I personally suggest:
"I place Netbiff in the public domain.  If this is legally impossible, then I 
grant irrevocable, perpetual permission to everyone to treat Netbiff exactly 
as if it were in the public domain.  Netbiff comes with NO WARRANTY."

If *anything* accomplishes the goal of "as-if-public-domain", then this 
should.  (The warranty disclaimer is not really related to copyright law, as 
implied warranties are, IIRC, incurred by distribution rather than 
authorship, which is why you want it regardless of the license.)



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