Can I remove the “above copyright notice…” section from the ISC license?

Question

The start of the ISC license is:

Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

I'm not interested in attention or credit, so I'd like to remove the line:

provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies

Simplifying the start to:

Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted.

Does this "damage" the ability of people to use the code in any way?

In the BSD license, this would be turning:

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

Into:

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted.

But I prefer the ISC license as it is shorter.

Answer 1

It's not a good idea. You would be fundamentally changing the license. I would guess that the original license text was written or reviewed by lawyers so that it would be acceptable to use and perhaps even stand up if legally challenged.

Licenses work by copyright. You own the copyright to the work, but you are granting other people permission to use the work that you own under a set of conditions. It seems like being able to track the actual owner of the copyright as the software is distributed and moved around is vitally important should there be any questions that arise.

Based on places I've worked, open source licenses may need legal review, with some common licenses already reviewed and allowed (with certain restrictions). Modifying the text changes the license - what you have is not the ISC license anymore - which would mean it would need review by legal. Without ownership identified, I don't see it being allowed for use.