Differentiating BSD-style licenses (was: DEP5: Machine-readable debian/copyright (the paperwork))

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Carsten Hey <carsten@debian.org> writes:

> It's might not be obvious for all which BSD licenses are meant by "BSD"
> and "FreeBSD", thus I propose appending " (3-clause BSD)" and
> respectively " (2-clause BSD)" to their descriptions.

That's even more ambiguous, though. It doesn't say *which* clauses; any
three-clause license similar to a BSD license could be “3-clause BSD”.

I've advocated making mnemonic descriptors for the particular clauses,
e.g. “attribution”, “no endorsement”, etc. Those have the disadvantage
of not being well-known, but the advantage (compared to simply counting
the clauses) that at least a guess as to which clauses are being
referenced will likely be right.

-- 
 \     “Unix is an operating system, OS/2 is half an operating system, |
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Ben Finney