fix LICENSE

[reqshark]

No description provided.

[SomeoneWeird]

NACK. We can't do this legally.

[mikeal]

Can we remove the dep licensing being that we have the deps in the source tree?

[ghostbar]

No we can't, and actually AFAIK you can't change the license like this from a derived work neither, you need permission from the contributors that agreed to this license to make a change.

(Even more the public domain part that actually takes more wording than the 11 words this PR has on the first line)

[reqshark]

I thought public domain under common law requires many many years for works to reach that kind of threshold.

And under those type of legal systems, copyright holders might encounter issues attempting to alienate their rights too early in this manner, it may not be possible without legal "consideration."

[ghostbar]

For public domain works you can use a dedication like https://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/ that takes a lot of working to try doing it public domain worldwide as much as possible (the CC zero license).

Thing is, you can't change the license of content you don't own without the consent of the owners.

As I wrote on IRC, licenses are legal documents that count as contract or agreement and can't be change without the interested parties consent (in this case, contributors that agreed to those license terms) since the agreement itself does not says it allows re-licensing.

And removing dependencies licenses is breach of this agreement since those licenses require to met certain conditions like retain of conditions of license and copyright notices, which were removed in this PR.

[gkatsev]

I've mentioned in IRC, but re-iterating here as well. We should consider a license similar to luvit since the public domain is hard to do as @ghostbar mentioned. Also, any license changes we'd want to make would have to apply to all changes starting now unless we are able to get all previous parties to accept a license change.

[Fishrock123]

MIT / ISC for life yo

[isaacs]

This is not likely to happen any time soon, sorry.

Public Domain is a great move for freedom. However, switching away from MIT at this time would be very problematic. It would take a LOT of negotiation and legal investigation to do this in a way that doesn't violate our use of V8, libuv, OpenSSL, etc.

[reqshark]

I guess the benefits of public domain don't outweigh the headache involved.

that's reasonable, MIT is close enough to de facto public domain anyway