Vorbis dev - Mar 2007 - Issue with the "Xiph license"

Hello!


There is a problem with the current name of the "Xiph license".
All the variantions of this name out there imply at least one of
these two false assumptions:

 * that the Xiph license would be a custom license not related
   to the BSD license at all

 * that the Xiph license would be based on BSD but is not the same

Both is wrong and both hurts Xiph. The license text is exactly
that of the "New BSD license" [1] with the placeholders filled
in with Xiph. It is the original text and therefore the original
license, not a variant. But there are many places currently not
reflecting this equality.

What I want to suggest is that we change all these terms into
"New BSD license" wherever we find them. Here is a short list
of troublesome excerpts that I stumbled on, with sources:



"Xiph.org variant of the BSD license"
-> http://www.speex.org/

"Sample Xiph.Org Variant of the BSD License"
-> http://www.xiph.org/licenses/bsd/speex/

"Sample Xiph.Org Variant of the BSD License"
-> http://www.xiph.org/licenses/bsd/

"Xiph.org's BSD license"
-> http://flac.sourceforge.net/developers.html

"The reference implementation libraries are licensed under Xiph's
variant of the
BSD License, a.k.a. the Xiph License. This is a trivial variation of the popular
BSD License where the Xiph.org Foundation is substituted for the University of
California, Berkeley. In simple terms, these libraries may be used by any
application, Open or proprietary, linked or incorporated in whole, so long as
acknowledgement is made to Xiph.org Foundation when using the source code in
whole or in derived works. The Xiph License is free enough that the libraries
have been used in commercial products to implement FLAC, including in the
firmware of hardware devices where other Open Source licenses can be
problematic."
-> http://flac.sourceforge.net/license.html

"For some other codecs' descriptions of the Xiph License see the Speex
and
Vorbis license pages."
-> http://flac.sourceforge.net/license.html



Would be great if the responsible people could fix this.
Thanks in advance!



Sebastian



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

On 3/12/07, Sebastian Pipping <webmaster@hartwork.org>
wrote:
> Both is wrong and both hurts Xiph. The license text is exactly
> that of the "New BSD license" [1] with the placeholders filled
> in with Xiph. It is the original text and therefore the original
> license, not a variant. But there are many places currently not
> reflecting this equality.
This is a valid concern, although this list is probably not the right
place to discuss it.  Whatever.

I have seen the Gentoo people having a tantrum, er, healthy discussion
regarding this issue, so it is causing problems; minor ones, but then
again, the fixes are minor too.

Unless anyone in Xiph opposes, we are now to refer to the license used
on libraries as the New BSD License.  Alright?  Let's fix any instance
where it may look otherwise.

-Ivo