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I love ISC — but you're quite on point. It also says nothing about any patents potentially held by the authors.

See this HN comment from a year ago for a fuller exploration of how that can be problematic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12597488

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The Lil License kind of makes sense if you think about it as an attempt to add explicit patent protection to an ISC or MIT-style license. But only "kind of".

What the patent system gives a patentholder is the ability to selectively prohibit others from making, selling, or using some product or method protected by the patent. The Lil License is weird in that it only explicitly mentions the latter.

Its text regarding copies of the license is also very weird.

Please do not use this license.

The term 'usage rights' is a bit confusing here. I think it may be intended to refer to 'use' as defined in the previous half of the sentence, i.e. 'including the rights to run, read, copy, change, distribute and sell'.

Maybe this should be made clearer somehow, e.g. 'and including any herefore necessary license to patents the authors may hold'.

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