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dshawul / Scorpio

Scorpio chess engine
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License clarification. What's promotion? #30

Open JoelEinbinder opened 2 years ago

JoelEinbinder commented 2 years ago

In a standard BSD license, the endorsement clause looks like:

Neither the name of the nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

In this library it is:

It is illegal to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission from Daniel Shawul.

I read BSD to mean I cannot use the project name to promote my own stuff. I can't say "Joel's Chess Engine, powered by Scorpion so you know it's good!"

I read the license on this library to say that I can't promote a derived product at all though, even if I'm not making reference to the original library. I can't say "Joel's Chess Engine is great!"

This seems like an incredibly restrictive license, and I wanted to clarify that that was the intent since it looks so close to a standard BSD license.

dshawul commented 2 years ago

I am not an expert in license's but when I put it back in 2006 it is called the "New BSD license or 3-clause BSD license". https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/licence/bsd-3-clause-new-or-revised-license The third clause seem to be slightly different now but I think it says essentially the same thing.

JoelEinbinder commented 2 years ago

A search of this clause has it only show up in your repo. Did you intend to modify the BSD to forbid promotion of any derived work? Can I send a PR that moves to a standard license?

dshawul commented 2 years ago

Sure please make a PR and I will update the license. I don't really recall how/when that happened but the intention was to use the new BSD license at that time.