Re: [HACKERS] Re: Revised Copyright: is this more palatable?

On Wed, Jul 05, 2000 at 11:13:45PM -0300, The Hermit Hacker wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Jul 2000, Jim Wise wrote:
>
> > I'd like to point out a couple things that are _not_ wrong with the
> > current license:
> >
> > 1.) With the current license, contributors to the code are not opened
> >     to legal liability for the code they contribute.  The BSD license
> >     very clearly disclaims all warranty on the part of not only UCB but
> >     also all contributors
>
> Actually, this is the only thing that I do feel the current license is
> missing ... unless I'm reading something wrong, it all focuses on
> disclaming "UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA"s liability ... that one is very
> specific ...

Since no-one else has mentioned this yet, I will: the Postgres license,
i.e., the file COPYRIGHT at the top level of the distribution, isn't
exactly identical to what's commonly known as "the BSD license". The
Postgres copyright, the BSD 4.4 copyright
(http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/license.html), and the FreeBSD copyright
(http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.html), are all
differently worded in parts, although clearly the same in intent. The
latter is almost identical to the BSD license template at
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.html . All of them
except ours say something like "REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS" when they're
disclaiming warranties; we just have the University of California doing
so.

The simplest way to change our license if we want to make sure that
it explicitly disclaims warranties on behalf of all contributors seems
to be to add to the existing California paragraphs a dead standard
BSD license with our contributors referred to collectively, which is
what Marc has proposed. There may be people who for one reason or
another (usually US law, as far as I can see) would like to see more
changes, but I can't see what's objectionable about this one.

Richard