Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Licence has self conflicting wording, possible typo #4784

Open
2 tasks done
jimboolio opened this issue Apr 15, 2024 · 3 comments
Open
2 tasks done

Licence has self conflicting wording, possible typo #4784

jimboolio opened this issue Apr 15, 2024 · 3 comments
Labels
unverified A bug that has been reported but not verified

Comments

@jimboolio
Copy link

jimboolio commented Apr 15, 2024

Checklist

  • I have searched the issue tracker for open issues that relate to the same problem, before opening a new one.
  • This issue only relates to a single bug. I will open new issues for any other problems.

Describe the bug

The LICENSE file has a BSD-3 Clause license but in between the usual BSD license rows there's the string "All rights reserved".

I did confirm on Wikipedia that this "all rights reserved" usually is used to indicate that the authors do not want their work to be copied or used or modified unless a permission is obtained. In software I think it is reasonable to expect that any kind of usage or modification without explicit permission would be prohibited when something has the words "all rights reserved". BSD license itself grants quite an wide set of rights, but all rights reserved grants none. I find this very conflicting and expect it to be a bug in either my understanding or in the wording. Either way it might deserve some clarification.

(removed boilerplate issue template here since technical details are unrelated on legal question, this issue appears at least on the master branch)

@jimboolio jimboolio added the unverified A bug that has been reported but not verified label Apr 15, 2024
@andydotxyz
Copy link
Member

I did confirm on Wikipedia that this "all rights reserved" usually is used to indicate that the authors do not want their work to be copied or used or modified unless a permission is obtained.

That isn't what the wikipedia article says to me at all. That phrase is included as part of the copyright and not a license term. In many geographies it is included and omission of it will not change the impact of copyright. Here in the UK copyright is automatically applied to any work created unless explicitly waived.

Open source is not about waiving copyright ownership, but about collaborating under suitable licensing terms so that everyone can use and contribute to the project.

@andydotxyz
Copy link
Member

The following article may be helpful - I appreciate it's not an identical license https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2121/mit-license-and-all-rights-reserved

@andydotxyz
Copy link
Member

The format we used is in some templates - such as this one: https://gist.github.com/nicolasdao/a7adda51f2f185e8d2700e1573d8a633#tldr---the-bsd-3-clause-license-should-do

As well as others. Due to it relating to the copyright and not the license I don't think this is an issue.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
unverified A bug that has been reported but not verified
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

2 participants