Advertising Clauses in Licenses

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Sun, 2002-01-20 at 21:07, Lawrence E. Rosen wrote:
> The "generally-deprecated advertising clause used by Apache" (a phrase
> used in an earlier email to this list) is, in my opinion, an entirely
> appropriate license provision.  The clause reads:
> 
> [... New version from the 1.1 license ...]

I think the original mail from Bruce was about the old one in the 1.0
version.
 
> The FSF website (http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/bsd.html), specifically
> discussing the "obnoxious" BSD advertising clause, argues that
> advertising clauses in licenses potentially lead to long lists of
> acknowledgements in derivative works.  RMS wrote that in 1997 he counted
> 75 such sentences that needed to be included in one version of NetBSD.  

This page also talks about the old deprecated BSD version of the clause.

The old version of the original BSD license and the old 1.0 Apache
License really were obnoxious because they demanded that "All
advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software"
should add specific comments about some of the authors. Not just in the
software and/or the documentation distributed together with the
product/derived work.

> All-in-all, I praise the advertising clause and encourage it to be used.

I agree. But maybe we need a new term to distinquish the old obnoxious
version of this 'advertising clause' and this new 'acknowledgement
clause' which seems very reasonable.

Cheers,

Mark
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