Change Cap'n Proto license to MIT?

[Kenton Varda]

Hi all,

I'm considering changing Cap'n Proto's license from 2-clause BSD to MIT. The two licenses are legally equivalent, so this change would have no practical impact.

There are two reasons I'd like to make the change:

- There are several different variants of the "BSD license" -- e.g. the 2-clause, the 3-clause, and the 4-clause. This leads to some confusion. Some people, when they see that Cap'n Proto is BSD-licensed, assume it is the 4-clause license, including the notorious advertising clause which many people find unacceptable. The MIT license, in contrast, has only one widely-used variant, and so no confusion.

- I've been noticing that lots of stuff is MIT licensed these days, including Node, Meteor, Rails, JQuery, and most stuff in their respective ecosystems. The BSD license has actually become an outlier. I feel like things were different 15 years ago when I originally learned about the OSS license landscape. In any case, conforming with everyone else reduces cognitive load.

Thoughts?

Jason and Remy, since you've made significant contributions over which you own copyright, I'll need your explicit permission for this.

-Kenton

[Tony Arcieri]

On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 8:59 PM, Kenton Varda <ken...@sandstorm.io> wrote:

- There are several different variants of the "BSD license" -- e.g. the 2-clause, the 3-clause, and the 4-clause. This leads to some confusion

^^^ exactly why you want the MIT license

 

--
Tony Arcieri

[Remy Blank]

I'm fine with the MIT license.

-- Remy

[Jason Choy]

I'm fine with it too