bitcoin
BIP39: add license and copyright section
These are required for legal use, and also per BIP-2, and they avoid user confusion as seen in https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1395#issuecomment-2393915807.
Choice of MIT license per BIP author feedback in https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1395#issuecomment-2393930721.
The license omission was likely an oversight.
BIP-39 predates BIP-2 by 2-3 years. BIP-1 (in force at the time, since superseded by BIP-2) did require a copyright or public domain section.
Concept ACK, but for a license change, I expect that we need all rights holders to agree. cc: @slush0, @ebfull, @voisine
is licensing and CLAs addressed in the new bip2 @murchandamus ?
Just in so far as we have always required an "acceptable license" that permitted others to use the work. My new process BIP draft so far does not propose a CLA.
2 BIP authors have ACKed but 2 others are not responding.
@murchandamus we'd want to ensure this case is covered by BIP3.
I don’t think this is a case that we can litigate. The authors have the copyright for this document. As far as I am aware, we do not have a record of them licensing it in any different manner than "all rights reserved", and it seems obvious to me that a subset of them cannot update the license, IANAL, though.
FWIW, BIP 3 asserts:
I did some additional research into this situation. I have come to the understanding that for jointly authored work any of the authors can license the work. Given that we have approval from three authors and BIP 1 already required that any contributions to this repository were placed into public domain or have a copyright statement, it would be hard to argue that BIP 39 was not intended to be licensed compliantly.
Given my updated understanding, I conclude that this is ready to be merged.