August 2004
Beginner to intermediate
208 pages
8h 3m
English
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The BSD License
The BSD License, which is only slightly more restrictive than the MIT License, exists in a number of substantially similar forms. The following example is the UCB/LBL form, named after the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
This license, like the MIT License, begins:
Copyright (c) <YEAR>, <OWNER>
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
The copyright notice and the attribution are substantially the same as those in the MIT License. Again, the license should reflect the actual year of copyright and the correct name of the creator.
Prior to 1999, the BSD License contained the following provision:
All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the University of California, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
This provision seems relatively innocuous. It seems both reasonable and natural that the creator, having surrendered the exclusive right to commercially exploit a work, should receive credit not only in the acknowledgment of rights but in the advertising as well. It does not challenge the essential premises of open source, as it does not limit the scope of the use of the software in any direct way. Nonetheless, the pre-1999 BSD License sometimes causes problems because of this clause. The principles of open ...