License Question: Difference between BSD and Blocks Public License ?

[Note, I resend this message, since the first message I sent was from a
sender address different from my subscription address]

Hi,
When checking out the source for beepcore, I wondered why this introduces
yet anoter open source licence. Looking at the license at

  http://www.beepcore.org/beepcore/about_publiclicense.jsp

reveals, that it is no different to the BSD-license

  http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php

(even though I didn't check every bit).

I would suggest in this case to actually drop the Blocks Public License
and use the BSD license for beepcore-java instead.

Rationale:

  - The BSD license is well known and has been verified to be an open
    source license.

  - it always causes troubles to check the licenses against each other if
    you introduce new code. For instance the Rfc822HeaderParser I've added
    (see my previous mail) originally was distributed with the w3c
    license. But I had to verify, that the Blocks Public License indeed
    is actually a BSD license before I contacted the original author to
    ask him that I might add some code to a BSD licensed project. This
    delayed my contribution; others might either not have bothered or
    would not have contributed at all.

  - As a base technology, like the (reference-) implementation of an RFC,
    a license with the low protection (like the BSD license) should be
    used, so that companies can include the package in their proprietary
    software.
    However, if this package introduces another license (even though it is
    equivalent to BSD) it is expensive to internally approve the license
    and monitor it for changes which might make companies not use the
    package. (I once worked for a company that only allowed BSD, Apache
    and LGPL libraries to link against; nothing else -- period.)

ciao,
  -hen

--
Henner Zeller
Freie Software durch B=FCcherkauf f=F6rdern | http://bookzilla.de/



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