The "Departure" section of the manifesto addresses very directly that the patch to BSD-2-Clause takes it out of the Open Source Definition:
> According to The Open Source Definition, discriminating against commerce and non-contributors is not “Open Source”. The Definition also prohibits discrimination against “fields of endeavor”, like commerce, and persons and groups, like non-contributors. That means License Zero is no longer an Open Source license, even if it remains remarkably generous, a public gift to charitable organizations, students, teachers, academics, and hobbyists everywhere.
L0-NC derives from BSD-2-Clause to make transition back to OSD-conformant terms very clear.
You're making it seem like it's just a technicality over definitions when it really is a fundamental difference. It explicitly rejects the "freedom zero" of open source, the freedom to actually run the software. It means that if I inadvertently download L0 software from npm at work, 91 days later my company is in violation of criminal copyright law. No open source license does that, not even AGPL. ("But you'd also be in violation if it were regular commercial software!" True, but in that case it wouldn't be on npm and I wouldn't have made that mistake).
If you want to position L0 as a way for commercial software vendors to distribute source, that's fine. But I strongly object to the implication that it's just a "patch" on top of existing open source licenses.
It is a patch on top of an open source license, BSD-2-Clause.
Legal terms aren't exactly like computer code, but the analogy works here. Unmodified BSD-2-Clause meets OSI's "test suite", the Open Source Definition, and FSF's test suite, "What is free software?". Patched, L0-NC fails both test suites. Passing isn't about provenance of the "raw material". It's about what the terms do.
The reason I did that, even though I could easily write a more modern and approachable permissive license than BSD-2-Clause, which is almost as old as I am, was to make automatic reversion back to open source terms very clear. The "patch" touches the header notice, and adds a third condition. The automatic waiver removes the new, third condition. That means BSD-2-Clause and some extra stuff in notice are left.
> According to The Open Source Definition, discriminating against commerce and non-contributors is not “Open Source”. The Definition also prohibits discrimination against “fields of endeavor”, like commerce, and persons and groups, like non-contributors. That means License Zero is no longer an Open Source license, even if it remains remarkably generous, a public gift to charitable organizations, students, teachers, academics, and hobbyists everywhere.
L0-NC derives from BSD-2-Clause to make transition back to OSD-conformant terms very clear.