| Author | The MirOS Project |
|---|---|
| Version | CVS r1.19[1] – can be considered the first version |
| Published | 11 December 2006 |
| DFSG compatible | Yes |
| Free software | Yes |
| OSI approved | Yes |
| GPL compatible | Yes |
| Copyleft | No |
| Linking from code with a different license | Yes |
| Website | HTML version, UTF-8 plain text version |
The MirOS Licence is a free content licence (for software and other free cultural works such as graphical, literal, musical, …) originated at The MirOS Project for their own publications because the ISC license used by OpenBSD was perceived as having problems with wording[2] and too America centric. It has strong roots in the UCB BSD licence and the Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer with a focus on modern, explicit, legible language and usability by European (except UK), specifically German, authors (while not hindering adoption by authors from other legislations). It is a permissive (“BSD/MIT-style”) licence.
Another novelty is that this licence was specified for any kind of copyrightable work from the start; as such, it does not only meet the Open Source Definition and Debian Free Software Guidelines but also the Open Knowledge Definition and, in fact, has been approved by the OKFN long before OSI did[1].
The licence has not seen formal legal review, but is listed on ifrOSS’ licence centre webpages.[3] The Free Software Foundation has not formally added the licence as either a free software licence or free documentation license to their pages, but their software directory has a category for it.[4]
It was later seen that some countries have special laws for databases, which should be considered in a later version of this licence, if any, to keep it as generally usable as possible. Patent and trademark law was intentionally not addressed, only copyright law, but the general idea is to have one “copycenter” style licence (more specifically, one that says do with it whatever you want, just don’t pretend it’s not mine and don’t sue me) for everything. This was partially prompted by the dilemma of people using the GPL for documentation because the GFDL is unfree, but the GPL (and all other traditional Open Source licences) was not suited for it.