The Any FOSS License License

This software is available under the terms of any license that currently appears on the list of approved open source licenses published by the Open Source Initiative or the list of approved free software licenses published by the Free Software Foundation.

@cwebber Great idea until Stallman dies and the FSF gets taken over by the Crown Prince of Korea, who thinks the Business Source Licence is great and they should approve it

@dpk @cwebber There's no need for any takeover, there are licenses on these lists that let you freely relicense to anything you want already.

@dos @dpk well the joke is that it's as permissive/lax of a license as the most permissive/lax license in effect, but most lax licenses aren't lax because they can be relicensed, they still ordinarily operate under the terms of the original license, unless there's a specific clause for relicensing

But GPLv3 "or later" has the challenge where you have to trust the FSF, and that does have that challenge (and is meant to evoke thoughts about that)

License upgrade stewardship is a tough problem.

@dos @dpk However, there's another joke in here about the *mutability* of this license choice: what happens if a license is *removed* from the list? By saying "currently" as opposed to "which appeared at any time", it's creating a challenge: it's not an append-only set, it could end up in strange places if something got removed

@cwebber @dpk Courts operate not just on the license's letter, but also its spirit, so taking over FSF to publish a permissive GPLv4 wouldn't necessarily be as effective as it may seem at first glance - even if it would still cause plenty of chaos. In contrast, the spirit of this joke license is pretty much "an overly complex way to say it's MIT-0/0BSD" - that is, unless a court decides otherwise, judging from the whole context around a particular case and particular people involved ;)

@dos @dpk Just wait till you find out about how Wikipedia relicensed from the GFDL to CC BY-SA

@dos @dpk And if you don't know, here's from memory what happened:

Wikipedia was licensed under the GFDL, and that was before CC BY-SA was available as the world's most popular copyleft license for cultural works. How to relicense with so many contributors?

So... Creative Commons, Wikimedia, and the Free Software Foundation collaborated on adding a new version of the GFDL that allowed for relicensing to CC BY-SA if it were done within a short time window to allow Wikipedia to do it