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BSD licenses represent a family of a permissive free software licenses. The original was used for the Berkeley Software Distribution, a Unix-like operating system for which the license is named. The original owners of BSD were the Regents of the University of California because BSD was first written at the University of California, Berkeley. The first version of the license was revised, and the resulting licenses are more properly called modified BSD licenses. Permissive licenses, sometimes with important differences pertaining to license compatibility, are referred to as "BSD-style licenses". The licenses have few restrictions compared to other free software licenses such as the GNU GPL or even the default restrictions provided by copyright, putting it relatively closer to the public domain. The BSD licenses have been referred to as copycenter, as a comparison to standard copyright and copyleft free software: "Take it down to the copy center and make as many copies as you want."
Terms The text of the license is considered to be in the public domain and thus may be modified without restriction. Proprietary software licenses compatibility The BSD License allows proprietary commercial use, and for the software released under the license to be incorporated into proprietary commercial products. Works based on the material may even be released under a proprietary license (but still must maintain the license requirements). Some notable examples of this are the use of BSD networking code in Microsoft products, and the use of numerous FreeBSD components in Mac OS X. It is possible for something to be distributed with the BSD License and some other license to apply as well. This was in fact the case with very early versions of BSD itself, which included proprietary material from AT&T. UC Berkeley advertising clause As originally distributed, the BSD license had an extra clause, requiring authors of all works deriving from a BSD-licensed work to include an acknowledgment of the original source. This is numbered as clause 3 in the original licence text: The GNU project called this clause "obnoxious", citing the requirement for 75 such acknowledgments when advertising a 1997 version of NetBSD . Pragmatically, this clause is an additional requirement barred by the GPL, making the earlier version of the BSD license incompatible with the GPL. Second, a large legal problem was that the advertising clause was incompatible with the terms of the GPL (which does not allow the addition of restrictions beyond those it already imposes) thus forcing a segregation of GNU and BSD software. The GNU project suggests people not use the phrase "BSD-style" licensing when they wanted to refer to an example of a non-copyleft license, in order to prevent inadvertent usage of the original BSD license.* Further, people who made changes to the source code tended to want to have their names added to the acknowledgement. This is problematic since with large numbers of people working on a single project (or for many separate projects in a software distribution), the advertising clause quickly created large and unwieldy acknowledgements. This '4-clause' advertising version was removed from the official BSD license text on July 22nd, 1999 by William Hoskins, the director of the office of technology licensing for Berkeley, in response to a request from Richard Stallman.ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.License.Change Other BSD distributions followed suit, but NetBSD still uses the original version of the license and many similar clauses remain in BSD derived code from other sources. The original license is now sometimes called "BSD-old" or "4-clause BSD", while the current revision of the BSD license is sometimes referred to by the by names including "BSD-new", "revised BSD", or "3-clause BSD". BSD-style licenses Several free or open source licenses that derive from or are similar to the BSD license are widely used: See also | ||||||||
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