BSD like license with strange wording?

[Robert-André Mauchin]

Hi,

The following license is lifted from a code coming from NetBSD 
(ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/sjg/ ) but I cannot find exactly 
the text of this license anywhere else:

#	This file is provided in the hope that it will
#	be of use.  There is absolutely NO WARRANTY.
#	Permission to copy, redistribute or otherwise
#	use this file is hereby granted provided that
#	the above copyright notice and this notice are
#	left intact.

Is this considered BSD-like?

Best regards,

Robert-André

[Florian Weimer]

* Robert-André Mauchin:

>  The following license is lifted from a code coming from NetBSD
>  (ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/sjg/ ) but I cannot find exactly 
>  the text of this license anywhere else:
>
>  #	This file is provided in the hope that it will
>  #	be of use.  There is absolutely NO WARRANTY.
>  #	Permission to copy, redistribute or otherwise
>  #	use this file is hereby granted provided that
>  #	the above copyright notice and this notice are
>  #	left intact.
>
>  Is this considered BSD-like? 
It doesn't say anything about modification.  I think it's non-free
because of that.

Thanks,
Florian

[Ben Cotton]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2021 at 6:52 AM Robert-André Mauchin <zebob.m(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  The following license is lifted from a code coming from NetBSD
>  (ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/sjg/ ) but I cannot find exactly
>  the text of this license anywhere else:
>
>  #       This file is provided in the hope that it will
>  #       be of use.  There is absolutely NO WARRANTY.
>  #       Permission to copy, redistribute or otherwise
>  #       use this file is hereby granted provided that
>  #       the above copyright notice and this notice are
>  #       left intact.
>
>  Is this considered BSD-like?
>  
Maybe! How old is it?

There's a loose precedent of accepting these sorts of short permissive
licenses so long as there's nothing to indicate that they're intending
to disallow modification. "Otherwise use" could certainly be construed
to permit modification in this case. But it's generally applied to
text from, say, 25ish years ago. So if it's very old, we could permit
it. If it's from this century, it's probably better for upstream to
put a "real" license on it.

-- 
Ben Cotton
He / Him / His
Senior Program Manager, Fedora & CentOS Stream
Red Hat
TZ=America/Indiana/Indianapolis

[Timothée FLoure]

FYI: I managed to contact upstream and should be able to get an explicit answer in the
coming days.

[Timothée FLoure]

Upstream kindly made a new release including the following LICENSE file:

```
The individual files in this distribution are copyright their
original contributors or assignees.
Including:

    Copyright (c) 1994-2020, Simon J Gerraty
    Copyright (c) 2010-2018, Juniper Networks, Inc.
    Copyright (c) 1988-1993Kind 
    	The Regents of the University of California.

Note: some of the *.mk files here were originally derrived from
early NetBSD bsd.*.mk and do not carry any explicit copyright notice,
or license terms, as is the custom in the BSD world for makefiles.

The contributions from Juniper Networks are under:

    SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-2-Clause

 and you can consider that the operative license.
```

[Ben Cotton]

On Sat, Mar 20, 2021 at 2:16 PM Timothée FLoure
<timothee.floure(a)posteo.net&gt; wrote:
>  Upstream kindly made a new release including the following LICENSE file:
>  
That's great! Thanks for working with upstream on this, Timothée.

Robert-André, you can proceed with this as a BSD-like license.

-- 
Ben Cotton
He / Him / His
Senior Program Manager, Fedora & CentOS Stream
Red Hat
TZ=America/Indiana/Indianapolis