Suggestion: recommend ISC license instead of 0BSD

[waldyrious]

0BSD was created by Rob Landley for use in toybox project, as a modification to the ISC license. Landley also submitted it for inclusion in SPDX.

It is not recognized as a stand-alone FOSS license by OSI, which links it to the Free Public License, and does not appear in FSF's license list. In fact, it is not a permissive FOSS license like the others in the BSD family, but a public domain dedication instead, as the author himself clarifies.

Therefore I feel recommending the ISC license (especially in the context of "short permissive software licenses") would be more useful than the more obscure, and potentially misleadingly-named 0BSD.

[koppor]

GitHub also used to recommend ISC instead of BSD: https://web.archive.org/web/20150814011343/http://choosealicense.com/licenses/. Nowadays, they do not show BSD anymore: https://choosealicense.com/licenses/

[waldyrious]

For reference, there's been extensive discussion about 0BSD vs. ISC vs. FPL in https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com/issues/464.

[david-a-wheeler]

Thanks for the link, that provides a lot more info. I'll take a look!

[mlinksva]

ISC is appropriate for the permissive list, but not exactly instead of 0BSD. 0BSD and Unlicense ought get the same treatment as CC0-1.0, which in turn does not seem correct. They aren't the WTFPL, which is the only semi-popular license I know of with no disclaimer of warranties.

[waldyrious]

Yes, good point. ISC is more of a BSD-1 than a BSD-0.

[landley]

OSI has decided to agree with SPDX and call 0BSD "Zero-Clause BSD", clearing up the naming confusion.

http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-November/003830.html