2. BSD Licenses
In the late 1970s, a group of computer scientists and graduate students at the University of California–Berkeley created the Berkeley Software Distribution (“BSD”), a small collection of software tools they had written for the Unix operating system. Over time, BSD expanded to become a full-fledged Unix-compatible operating system in its own right.[1] BSD was issued under the BSD License, which lent its name to a family of software licenses collectively known today as “BSD-style” licenses.[2]
BSD-style licenses are models of brevity compared with the GPL. They mandate an express copyright notice acknowledging the owner and year of the work[3] and authorize “[r]edistribution and use” of the licensed software “in source and binary forms, with or without modification[.]”[4] This authorization is subject to only three conditions:
- for software works distributed in the form of source code, the distribution must include the copyright notice, the listing of conditions from the license template, and a paragraph disclaiming warranties or liability based in contract or tort;
- for software works distributed in the form of object code, those same items must be included in the accompanying documentation; and
- for either type of work, the name of the owner’s organization or its contributors may not be employed in a manner that suggests endorsement or promotion of products derived from the licensed software.[5]
- ↑ See Weber, supra note 9, at 29–35, 39–42. Legal threats from AT&T in the 1990s, culminating in a lawsuit against the University of California, slowed the pace of BSD development. Id. at 49–52; see also David McGowan, Between Logic and Experience: Error Costs and United States v. Microsoft Corp., 20 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1185, 1204–07 (2005) (recounting history of BSD).
- ↑ A BSD-style license template is available at http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php (last visited Mar. 4, 2010) [hereinafter BSD License]. As there noted, the particular provisions of the BSD license and its variant forms have changed over time, although in ways that are largely not pertinent to the present analysis. BSD licensing is widely used in FOSS projects, although less commonly than the GPL and LGPL. See supra note 50 and accompanying text. The “three-clause” standard-form BSD-style license described herein meets both OSI’s Open Source Definition and the FSF’s definition of “free software.” See supra note 48. A “four-clause” variant, seldom employed today, is not compatible with the FOSS definitions of either OSI or FSF. See infra note 84.
- ↑ BSD License, supra note 81 (providing notice of the form “Copyright (c) <YEAR>, <OWNER>. All rights reserved.”). “<YEAR>” and “<OWNER>” represent variables that are to be replaced with the values appropriate for the licensed work when the work is distributed. Express copyright notices of this type are no longer required as a condition of copyright protection, but are permitted, under U.S. and international copyright law. See infra note 171 and accompanying text.
- ↑ BSD License, supra note 81.
- ↑ See id. This last requirement is omitted from the “Simplified BSD License,” a variant used by some BSD-derived projects. Id. A former version of the BSD License included a
Tech. L.J. 1421, 1488 & n.255 (2006) (same); Dusollier, supra note 8, at 1418 (noting this benefit, although questioning the LGPL’s premise that dynamic linking creates a derivative work); Stoltz, supra note 76, at 1452. But cf. Why You Shouldn’t Use the LGPL, supra note 77 (encouraging FOSS developers to release software libraries under the GPL rather than the LGPL precisely to forbid proprietary software works from linking to the library).
