The next least restrictive kind of license grants unrestricted
rights to copy, use, modify, and redistribute modified copies as long
as a copy of the copyright and license terms is retained in all
modified versions, and an acknowledgment is made in advertising or
documentation associated with the package. Grantee has to give up
the right to sue the maintainers.
The original BSD license is the best-known license of this kind.
Among parts of the free-software culture that trace their lineages
back to BSD Unix,
this license is used even on a lot of free software that was written
thousands of miles from
Berkeley.
It is also not uncommon to find minor variants of the BSD
license that change the copyright holder and omit the advertising
requirement (making it effectively equivalent to the MIT license).
Note that in mid-1999 the Office of Technology Transfer of the
University of California rescinded the advertising clause in the BSD
license. So the license on the BSD software has been relaxed in
exactly this way. Should you choose the BSD approach, we strongly
recommend that you use the new license (without advertising clause)
rather than the old. That requirement was dropped because it led to
significant legal and procedural complications over what constituted
advertising.
You can find a BSD license template at the OSI
site.
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