Edit: I initially misidentified the project-specialized clause as the key new clause; my text below has been expanded and corrected. I thank almost and artost for their corrections below.
This project's eccentric worries don't justify the license proliferation.
The new elastic "do what I mean" clause -- "Any redistribution, in whole or in part, must retain full licensing functionality, without any attempt to change, obscure or in other ways circumvent its intent" -- just adds a new cognitive barrier to the easy participation and mixing with other projects that's usually the whole point of open source.
I also wonder if the new restriction is legally meaningful in any realistic situation. There was no right to arbitrarily relicense BSD code to circumvent its conditions before the addition.
Given that the essential conditions of the BSD license are attribution and non-endorsement, how does this new clause add anything but confusion?
Even in the absence of the updated wording, any marketing falsely implying a endorsement from the main project would be actionable under other principles. Even with the updated wording, is there cause of action against someone who, in their promotional materials, makes a factual statement about the origin of the code?
If so strictly enforced, the BSD license itself is almost self-contradictory: you must include a "Copyright (c) 2009, Alexander Stigsen, e-texteditor.com" in distributions and documentation... but you must not use his name or product name to "promote" your derived product. Can you achieve both of those when the distribution and documentation are themselves the primary "promotional" materials of a free work? Adding the new 'anticircumvention' wording only makes this worse; I wonder if a lawyer was even consulted in the redrafting.
And, it's not like the name "e-texteditor" or the names of the current or future contributors are marketing gold, anyway.
You're right; <strike>but they've even reworded that clause.</strike> I'm correcting my grandparent comment to reflect reality, with a note that it's been changed.
My initial writing was also confusing the 'simplified BSD license' used by FreeBSD (without the "no-endorsement" clause) with the full classic BSD.
And this is another reason to hate license proliferation. Remembering all the "BSD, except X" variations is an error-prone pain. Let's be coding and sharing, not lawyering.
This project's eccentric worries don't justify the license proliferation.
The new elastic "do what I mean" clause -- "Any redistribution, in whole or in part, must retain full licensing functionality, without any attempt to change, obscure or in other ways circumvent its intent" -- just adds a new cognitive barrier to the easy participation and mixing with other projects that's usually the whole point of open source.
I also wonder if the new restriction is legally meaningful in any realistic situation. There was no right to arbitrarily relicense BSD code to circumvent its conditions before the addition.
Given that the essential conditions of the BSD license are attribution and non-endorsement, how does this new clause add anything but confusion?
Even in the absence of the updated wording, any marketing falsely implying a endorsement from the main project would be actionable under other principles. Even with the updated wording, is there cause of action against someone who, in their promotional materials, makes a factual statement about the origin of the code?
If so strictly enforced, the BSD license itself is almost self-contradictory: you must include a "Copyright (c) 2009, Alexander Stigsen, e-texteditor.com" in distributions and documentation... but you must not use his name or product name to "promote" your derived product. Can you achieve both of those when the distribution and documentation are themselves the primary "promotional" materials of a free work? Adding the new 'anticircumvention' wording only makes this worse; I wonder if a lawyer was even consulted in the redrafting.
And, it's not like the name "e-texteditor" or the names of the current or future contributors are marketing gold, anyway.