The Copyright section specifies additional conditions, so the License
header is not correct (or at least misleading). So let's just remove it.
This is pragmatic because the field was only added as part of the
activation of BIP 2 anyway, and there are other old BIPs with a License
header.
The actual reason why I suggest this is that I think that's a great
default choice for a new BIP, so it's a perfect example. CC0-1.0 is a
great liberal choice for the BIP document (and test vectors etc.), and
MIT is the common choice for code in our ecosystem. Putting both BIP and
code under the "OR" avoids any confusion about which part is licensed
under which terms and also avoids any hassle when reorganizing, e.g.,
when moving code out of the BIP Markdown file to a separate file etc.
But I don't want this PR to recommend a license, so let me sell this
change as an editorial change to an example, which is warranted because
the MIT is much more known than FSFAP, in particular in this ecosystem.
I think that requirement is not helpful. I don't think hat including
additional licenses will be overwhelming to the reader. If anything, it
will obfuscates the actual licensing conditions. (Anyway, this should be
super rare.)
That's a bit of legal nitpicking, sorry. CC0 contains something like a
public domain dedication along with a fallback license, so it's neither
entirely. Some call it a "legal instrument". I prefer not calling it
anything.
SPDX doesn't have an official identifier for "public domain", at least
not for the simple "This document is placed into the public domain"
declarations used in some BIPs, see
https://wiki.spdx.org/view/Legal_Team/Decisions/Dealing_with_Public_Domain_within_SPDX_Files
for the rationale provided by their legal team. The rationale is sound,
but It's possible to create "user-defined" identifiers of the form
LicenseRef-X. This is a good idea here to make sure that all SPDX
expression will be formally valid.
And in our case, all "PD" BIPs match the following pseudo regex, so
there's not much potential for confusion:
"This (document|BIP|work|proposal) is (hereby)? (placed)? in the
public domain."
So it makes sense to keep using a single identifier for all of these.
See https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/commits/master/bip-0340 for a list
of contributors. I have obtained permission to do this change from all
contributors in private. Nevertheless, it would be good to get an ACK
from every contributor in order to have publicly available evidence.
- [ ] @sipa
- [ ] @jonasnick
- [ ] @theStack
- [ ] @ysangkok
I haven't contacted @Sajjon and @satsie, whose contributions constitute
of fixing not more than two typos and are thus below the threshold of
originality required for copyright to be applicable.
Tim Ruffing
