chore: Dual license between Unlicense and MIT

[Tyler887]

Description

Resolves the discussion at #4868.

Motivation and Context

This PR should close #4868.

See the issue (community) or read my recent email (maintainers) for more info.

Checklist:

• I have read the Contributing Guide.
• I have updated the documentation accordingly.
• I have updated the tests accordingly.

[rashil2000]

The base branch needs to be develop

[rasa]

I am not a lawyer, but I have read a bit on this and have some thoughts:

1. The Unlicense appears to be compatible with the MIT license, so dual-licensing appears acceptable.¹
2. Some lawyers contend that the Unlicense is not really a license.¹
3. It took almost 10 years for it to be approved as an OSI license, as it was originally dismissed as a "crayon license".¹
4. The Unlicense homepage suggests the file be named UNLICENSE This seems better than LICENSE.PD.²
5. I suggested we dual-license with the MIT license, but I would like to hear from @lukesampson, and other maintainers, about this suggestion, as this is a pretty big change.

[lukesampson]

Thanks for looking into this guys. Personally I'm happy for the project to become dual-licensed under unlicense and MIT. I wouldn't mind it just being licensed under MIT but I'm not sure how feasible that is.

[chawyehsu]

For license files naming convention, there have been some projects dual-licensed under Unlicense and MIT, such as https://github.com/BurntSushi/byteorder and https://github.com/BurntSushi/aho-corasick. You may look through them and see how they practice (LICENSE-MIT UNLICENSE and COPYING).

Not a lawyer, but I think it's legal to relicense it to MIT since our contributors have already implicitly signed all their commits are licensed under the Unlicense license and given to public domain, which means ppl can literally do anything with it, relicensing included, whether dual-licensing or just changing the license. New license's restrictions will be applied to future commits though.

I'm personally ok with the license update.

[Tyler887]

I've renamed both now.

[Tyler887]

I am not a lawyer, but I have read a bit on this and have some thoughts:

1. The Unlicense appears to be compatible with the MIT license, so dual-licensing appears acceptable.1
2. Some lawyers contend that the Unlicense is not really a license.1
3. It took almost 10 years for it to be approved as an OSI license, as it was originally dismissed as a "crayon license".1
4. The Unlicense homepage suggests the file be named UNLICENSE This seems better than LICENSE.PD.2
5. I suggested we dual-license with the MIT license, but I would like to hear from @lukesampson, and other maintainers, about this suggestion, as this is a pretty big change.

Can you fix your links to use a link to the desktop Wikipedia instead (removing .m from the URL)? This acts like a problem with linking, as many Google results select en.m.wikipedia.org instead of en.wikipedia.org.

[Tyler887]

Please fix any conflicts with the CHANGELOG if any further changes come to develop, as this raises the change I made to the top of the changelog while retaining other changes.

[Tyler887]

For license files naming convention, there have been some projects dual-licensed under Unlicense and MIT, such as https://github.com/BurntSushi/byteorder and https://github.com/BurntSushi/aho-corasick. You may look through them and see how they practice (LICENSE-MIT UNLICENSE and COPYING).

Not a lawyer, but I think it's legal to relicense it to MIT since our contributors have already implicitly signed all their commits are licensed under the Unlicense license and given to public domain, which means ppl can literally do anything with it, relicensing included, whether dual-licensing or just changing the license. New license's restrictions will be applied to future commits though.

I'm personally ok with the license update.

I'll modify the README to use the SPDX identifier Unlicense OR MIT instead of just Unlicense, because I prefer allowing them to choose one of those licenses. Requiring that all licenses are met means it is in PD, but some restrictions are placed, so that would be a conflict because no restrictions are meant to be applied to PD works.

This PR was made just in case a problem with people in Germany (and certain other countries) get punished for distributing Scoop, as it is a dual-license that if PD exists in their country, they can choose to distribute without the copyright notice from the file MIT-LICENSE, else, they must have the copyright notice.

[rasa]

In 2015, the MIT license was, by far, the most popular license on GitHub. MIT had a 45% share to the second most popular's 13% (GPLv2). See https://github.blog/2015-03-09-open-source-license-usage-on-github-com/

[chawyehsu]

I don't know whether you browse the projects referred above or not. But you can name the MIT license file as LICENSE-MIT, and leave the Unlicense license file as UNLICENSE, while adding a COPYING file to declare the dual licenses statement. And its SPDX identifier is Unlicense OR MIT for sure. This is how https://github.com/BurntSushi/byteorder did many years ago. It's short and sweet and GitHub will navigate the "view license" event to the UNLICENSE file by default. Having any problem adopting this solution?

[rasa]

A couple of minor typos, but it looks good to me. Thx 4 sticking with it!

[niheaven]

Last comment, it should be Unlicense OR MIT license, right? Not Unlicense AND MIT license which means you must adapt both license requirement instead of preferred one.

[chawyehsu]

- and
+ or

[Tyler887]

Done! (Yes, Git's plaintext view for this pull request is at https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Scoop/pull/4870.patch)

[rasa]

Retracted.

Sorry to raise this at this late stage, but I noticed the MIT license text lacks a copyright holder.

I would prefer that the MIT license be in LICENSE, with the 2 copyright lines. Without that, it's unclear what legal entities the license is being issued by.

Then an UNLICENSE file that is the original LICENSE file.

And finally, a COPYING file that says something like:

---

SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT or UNLICENSE

Unless otherwise stated this software is available to you under your choice of one of two licenses. You may choose to be licensed under the terms of the MIT license (see LICENSE) or the Unlicense (see UNLICENSE), both are included in this package.

---

I can make these changes if that's OK with the team.

[rasa]

This is ready to merge, but I'm not sure why there is strikeout, and a repeating line. I would suggest it simply read:

Copyright (c) 2013-2017 Luke Sampson (https://github.com/lukesampson)
Copyright (c) 2013-2022 Scoop contributors (https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Scoop/graphs/contributors)

Or drop the ending year:

Copyright (c) 2013 Luke Sampson (https://github.com/lukesampson)
Copyright (c) 2013 Scoop contributors (https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Scoop/graphs/contributors)

but including the initial year is advisable per here and here.

[niheaven]

I prefer former ones that have ending year, and the 2022 should just be present, e.g., 2013-present. (as Babel's)

Or just like .NET's, remove the starting and ending year.

[niheaven]

but I'm not sure why there is strikeout, and a repeating line

I've the same question, what's the strikeout mean? @Tyler887

[niheaven]

Close since #4903