I agree about the ISC, that's why OpenBSD, the most free OS (as in you can do whatever you want with a larger percentage of it than any other OS), prefers using the ISC over the BSD license now.
> This license does have an unfortunate wording choice: it provides recipients with "Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software…" This is roughly the same language from the license of Pine that the University of Washington later claimed prohibited people from distributing modified versions of the software.
To me, it sounds like "modify and/or distribute" means it should be okay to both modify and then distribute the modified version. But I'm not a lawyer, and if the same language has been used to argue you can't distribute modified versions, that's pretty scary. Enough reason to prefer the slightly longer MIT license.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license https://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/legal.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#X11License
Either way, though, the OpenBSD folks didn't change "and" to "and/or" in their template, which ranks high for a search for "ISC license". Someone could easily copy the older, problematic version. Given the MIT license works fine, why take even a small risk?
In fact, and/or is exactly the way to specify that options can either be used together or separately. The FSF's claimed problem, you'll note, isn't that this language was ever held to restrict distributing modified versions, only that similar language was once argued by a party with a financial interest in the outcome to have that effect.
Which is a pretty flimsy basis to assert a problem. I'm sure you can find passages in the GPL that are "roughly the same" language to something that someone, somewhere, argued in a court case meant something that would be frightening if it was what the similar language in the GPL passage was actually treated as meaning under the law, but the fact that someone once argued that a similar piece of the language means something doesn't mean that the language that they argued about (and even less, the actual license language that it is "roughly the same as") has ever been or would ever be given that effect in court.