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(Holloway) Chew, Kean Ho's Liberal License

IMPORTANT NOTICE

This license was drafted by a software developer based on his past experiences across software, service, and agriculture industries.

Like all legal documents, YOU MUST ALWAYS ENGAGE A LAWYER TO VALIDATE ITS FEASIBILITY.

NEVER ASSUME WHEN DEALING WITH LEGAL TRANSACTIONS.

A published baseline liberal license targeting publicly obtainable, commercial, and proprietor source-liberty product licensing needs. This license adopted from Open Source Initiative's Apache 2.0 License software license and Creative Common Licenses product license as its baseline and applied the following changes matching the current timeline:

  1. Changed Software to Product so that the license can be expanded to non-software product licensing uses (e.g. graphics, video, manufacturing design, audio, etc) without needing to spin multiple outbound licenses; AND
  2. Added license assignment, ratification, and tenure section to specify when and how is the license applied; AND
  3. Added license termination section to specify when the license is matured; AND
  4. Added version controlled clause for continuous improvement; AND
  5. Added sensitive data management and security coverage; AND
  6. Structured known Rights to Use sections for easier parsing and referencing (based on Creative Common Licenses); AND
  7. Added non-contact Rights to Use clauses (example: as dataset for training AI); AND
  8. Added force manjure limitation of liabilities; AND
  9. Added minimal agreed judiciary damage; AND
  10. Added geographical indicator coverage; AND
  11. Added designation indicator coverage; AND
  12. Added protected geographical indicator coverage; AND
  13. Added protected designation indicator coverage; AND
  14. Added integrated circuit layout design use coverage; AND
  15. Added industrial design use coverage; AND
  16. Added trade secret use coverage; AND
  17. Added trademark use coverage; AND
  18. Applied plainlanguage.gov specifications; AND
  19. Re-written from scratch by human with the only input provision assistance from Claude AI; AND
  20. Addressed the modified and derived Products' renaming grey area issue; AND
  21. Added statutory time limit for any legal claim; AND
  22. Added QR code notice type for space constrained product display.

This repository was formerly known as the following but was renamed for consistency purposes:

  1. (Holloway) Chew, Kean Ho's Public Domain License
  2. (Holloway) Chew, Kean Ho's BSD Zero Clause License

Business Reasons

This project was initiated for 4 reasons:

  1. As of year 2024, there were too many license related incidents due its outdated nature leading to legal exploits; AND
  2. Most non-commercial licenses are out-of-date and does not implement automatic update to the license clauses aside from point-releasing; AND
  3. Most licenses are not clear about guidelines and a lot of the licenses are too vague in its obligation coverage; AND
  4. There is a need for a far more liberal license meant for common critical products (example: software kernel libraries) that are compatible with other licenses similar to 0BSD and CC0.

Version Controlled

This license is version controlled using semantic versioning definitions where:

  1. the MAJOR version denotes major legal changes; AND
  2. the MINOR version denotes minor changes without altering the legal implication side of things such as but not limited to grammar correction, fonts, typo, and etc; AND
  3. the PATCH version denotes the repository management changes such as but not limited to new language addition, updating README.md, and etc.

By default, the license is always using the latest and greatest. If you want a specific version, download that license file and include it into your product repository.

License Nature

To comply with PlainLanguage.gov, You have to read the license files directly. It must be easily readable for any general public audience without assistance.

If you cannot parse or understand any part of the license, that means the license has not fully achieve the guideline yet. In that case, please file a query issue.

Credits

These are the official stewards of the license:

  1. (Holloway) Chew, Kean Ho - principal author and reviewer.

These are the folks who indirectly improve this license upto a considerable quality either by resources sharing or scanning:

  1. Bruce Payne - for relentlessly providing license drafting guidances and emotional positivity.
  2. Anthropic's Claude AI - for providing a lot of great inputs for me to fine-tune clauses and clues for hunting for actual legal resources.
  3. Chua, Yee Soong - for guiding over Malaysia's legal acumen and resources.

Researches

Publication License

This workspace and repository is published under Creative Common CC-BY-ND 4.0.

Reference & Download Source

The latest license files shall be referenced and be downloadable from:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13770769

License Notice

The following are the license notice within the supported languages:

English

Copyright [YEAR] [FULL_LEGAL_NAME] [CONTACT_LIKE_EMAIL_ADDRESS]


Licensed under (Holloway) Chew, Kean Ho’s Liberal License (the "License").
You must comply with the license to use the content. Get the License at:

                 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13770769

You MUST ensure any interaction with the content STRICTLY COMPLIES with
the permissions and limitations set forth in the license.

OR label the QR code