On the Variability of the BSD and MIT Licenses
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The MIT/X11 and the BSD are two of the most important family of Free and Open Source (FOSS) licenses. Because these licenses are to be inserted into the files that use it, and because they are expected to be changed by those who use them, their text has suffered alterations over time. Some of this variability is the result of licenses containing template fields which allow the license to be customized to include information such as the copyright holder name. Other variability can be attributed to changes in spelling, punctuation, and adding or removing conditions. This study empirically evaluated the extent that the BSD and MIT/X11 family of licenses are varied, and the manner and frequency in which license texts vary from the original definition. The study found that the BSD family has little variability, with a significant proportion fitting the common standard. The MIT/X11 family of licenses exhibited significantly more variation, with a higher propensity to customize the license text. In addition, the MIT/X11 license has spawned several specialized variants which likely constitute different legal meanings. Based on these findings, recommendations are proposed on what variability needs to be accommodated by the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) which is in the process of standardizing the allowed variability of both licenses.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it