Is admin/unidata/copyright.html a free software license?

[Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>]

[I'd have expected a previous discussion on this, but I failed to find
one in the archives of this mailing list. Sorry if this is a duplicate.]

File admin/unidata/copyright.html (also at [1]) contains the "Unicode
Terms of Use" which say in section H.2:

| Unicode, Inc. shall have the right to modify this Agreement at any
| time by posting it to this website.

This allows the copyright holder to unilaterally revoke the freedoms,
which I believe fails the free software definition [2]:

"In order for these freedoms to be real, they must be permanent and
irrevocable as long as you do nothing wrong; if the developer of the
software has the power to revoke the license, or retroactively add
restrictions to its terms, without your doing anything wrong to give
cause, the software is not free."

IMHO it also fails Debian's "Tentacles of Evil" test [3] which says:

"To be free, the license cannot allow even the author to take away the
required freedoms."

I am also surprised that these lists in admin/unidata/ or, in general,
a character set can be copyrightable. (For example, everyone uses ASCII
without thinking about copyright of the underlying ANSI X3.4 standard.
The same applies to several much larger CJK character sets.)


[1] https://www.unicode.org/copyright.html
[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.en
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines#debian-legal_tests_for_DFSG_compliance