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MIT License can't have "all rights reserved." #2129
Description
According to README.md, PowerShell is licensed under the MIT License. However, when I open LICENSE.txt I see the following:
PowerShell 6.0
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation
All rights reserved.
MIT License
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to . . .
How can all rights be reserved while granting all the rights under the MIT License? To reserve all rights while granting all the rights under the MIT license is completely contradictory. Of course, Microsoft can retain the copyright but it can't reserve all rights and license under MIT.
Credit: I did not discover this issue. It was discussed on episode 480 of the Windows Weekly podcast. The license-specific discussion (including this issue) is between about 11m:45s and about 13m:05s.
Activity
MartinSGill commentedon Aug 30, 2016
Not sure that applies IANAL but:
http://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2121/mit-license-and-all-rights-reserved
Suggests it's entirely correct to do that.
LarryWeiss commentedon Aug 30, 2016
A copy of
LICENSE.TXTis athttps://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/master/LICENSE.txt
jsoref commentedon Aug 31, 2016
FWIW, I agree w/ @dworzanski ; I've been involved in license discussions with other projects, as well as discussions about writing licenses....
@dworzanski : as an aside, you probably should run a spell checker against your post in http://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2121/mit-license-and-all-rights-reserved .
(Yes, I'm a bit biased, pretty much all of my contributions to the PowerShell repository are fixing numerous spelling mistakes. The reason to fix spelling mistakes is to make arguments and code easier to read, by decreasing distraction and ambiguity. Such mistakes also decrease from the perceived professionalism of a work and thus decrease the weight of its argument.)
joeyaiello commentedon Aug 31, 2016
IANAL, so I can't make any kind of statement about the content of the thread, but I do wanna let you know we're looking into it internally.
joeyaiello commentedon Oct 24, 2016
Wanted to loop back and let you guys know that, after consulting with our lawyers, we won't be changing the language. The basic gist is that we want to reserve any and all rights not granted by MIT. There's also some other precedent out there for "All rights reserved" being used in MIT.
@dworzanski: If this is a dealbreaker for you for one reason or another, please let me know here (or we can follow up privately if you like).
jsoref commentedon Oct 26, 2016
Joey Aiello (@joeyaiello) : fwiw, I don't think that WebRTC calls its license "MIT" or "BSD". I /think/ the license itself is basically BSD w/ the reservation you're using, but in my quick search, MIT doesn't appear anywhere relating to the license. And where it does mention "BSD", it says "like most BSD licenses" instead of saying "this is under the BSD license".
https://webrtc.org/faq/#what-does-this-license-let-me-do
Note: These comments don't mean that I object to the license, I'm just wearing a very detailed oriented hat for the moment.
joeyaiello commentedon Oct 26, 2016
Gotcha. So you guys take more issue with the fact that we're calling it MIT with a slight modification of the language than the language itself? That actually makes sense to me.
I can't promise a quick turnaround, but I am going to still follow-up to see what we can do here.
jsoref commentedon Oct 26, 2016
Yes, I believe that's a reasonable summary of our opinions.
And don't worry about speed. (Everyone w/ even a little bit of experience w/ licenses quickly learns that anything involving them is slow.)
Normalize copyright and license header