Blue Oak Council Inc, a Delaware nonprofit corporation, published a model license version 1.0.0, last week. The new license demonstrates all the techniques used by the licenses to make the software free and simple for everyone to use and build on.
The licensing materials published by Blue Oak is in everyday language, making it easy for developers, lawyers, and others to understand software licensing without relying on legal help. Blue Oak model license 1.0.0 comes with information regarding purpose, acceptance, copyright, notices, excuse, patent, reliability, and no liability.
The license states that it provides everyone with as much permission to work with the software as possible. It also protects the contributors from liability. It states that users must agree to the rules of the license to receive it. Users should refrain from doing things that would defy the rules of the license.
Additionally, it states that everyone who gets a copy of any part of the software
(with or without changes) also receives a text of this license or a link to Blue Oak Council license 1.0.0.
Also, in case anyone notifies the users in writing that they have not complied with Notices, then they can keep their license by taking all the practical and necessary steps to needed to comply within 30 days, post-notice. If users fail to follow this, the license will end immediately.
Apart from this, Blue Oak Council has also published certain example provisions for contracts and grants, along with a corporate open source policy that helps with the permissive licenses. There’s also a list of permissive public software licenses on the OSI and SPDX lists. These licenses have been rated from gold to lead, based on criteria such as the clarity of drafting, simplicity, and practicality of conditions.
For more information, check out the official Blue Oak Council blog post.
Read Next
Red Hat drops MongoDB over concerns related to its Server Side Public License (SSPL)
Neo4j Enterprise Edition is now available under a commercial license