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The owners of the original BSD distribution were the " Regents Of The University Of California ". This is because BSD originally came from the University Of California, Berkeley . The official BSD license has been revised since its inception, and has inspired numerous variants used by others to license their software programs (see "BSD-style licenses" section below). This license has few restrictions on it compared to other licenses such as the GNU GPL or even the default restrictions provided by Copyright , putting it relatively closer to the Public Domain . The BSD License has 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." {Link without Title} The modified BSD license has the same freedom as copyleft free software for making verbatim copies of software. TERMS OF THE BSD LICENSE The text of the license is considered to be in the Public Domain and thus may be modified without restriction. To suit the needs of a particular individual or organization, one should switch out the terms "Regents of the University of California", "University of California, Berkeley", and "Regents" with their own name.
Compatibility with proprietary software licenses 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 . Compatibility with other free software licenses As originally written, the BSD license contained terms that made it incompatible {Link without Title} with the GPL (see the "advertising clause" section below). As these are among the most commonly-used licensing agreements for free and open source software, it was a serious problem for software authors to be unable to mix GPL and BSD components in their own projects. As of a revision to the BSD license in 1999, the controversial clause was removed. Since then, authors of free and open source software have been free to incorporate BSD-licensed software with GPL-licensed works. THE 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 referred to it as the "obnoxious BSD advertising clause", as there were two main problems from their perspective: First, 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. Second, a large legal problem was 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 went so far as to suggest 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. This '4-clause' advertising version was removed from the official BSD license text on July 22 1999 by William Hoskins , the director of the office of technology licensing for Berkeley, in response to a request from Richard Stallman . The document enacting that revocation is available here . 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 EXTERNAL LINKS
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