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Comment by maq1234 | Hacker News Reader

I think releasing it on yet-another-open-source-license instead of some of well-known ones severely degrades the possibility for this code to be used by companies.

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It's the zlib license, which is used by GLFW, SDL, and SFML as well. Companies seem to have no problem using things like SDL, so I think this is fine.

Still, it would be nice is to state that is is the zlib license, and to include the license in the repository.

And it looks more or less fundamentally identical to the 3-clause BSD license.

The zlib license predates 3-clause BSD (zlib was released under the zlib license in 1995, BSD started releasing code under 3-clause BSD in 1999).

I will admit that when I first saw the zlib license, I was similarly confused but it's actually a license that is about the same age as most other common licenses (and quite a large body of software is licensed under it).

The 3-clause BSDL is just the 4-clause with clause #3 removed. Per Wikipedia, the 4-clause dates to 1990: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#4-clause_license_... . (I.e., all of the text in the 3-clause BSD license was written in 1990.)

No software was licensed under the 3-clause BSD license (because it didn't exist) until 1999. Just because the text is similar to an earlier license doesn't change that software licensed under zlib precedes software licensed under 3-clause BSD.

But that's not really the point -- GGGP implied that the license was written from scratch ("yet-another-open-source-license") and that's obviously not true.

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