Simplified BSD license

[John Cowan]

Chuck Swiger scripsit:

> If you check here:
> 
>     http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php
> 
> ...note that they've included the 1999 statement from UCal/Berkeley  
> stating that clause 3 is "hereby deleted in its entirety."  

That refers to clause 3 of the original or 4-clause BSD, the "obnoxious"
required-advertising clause, which made it incompatible (according to
the FSF) with the GPL:

      * 3. 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, Berkeley and its contributors.

Anything licensed by UCB itself under the 4-clause BSD is now as if
it were licensed under the 3-clause BSD, and it's the latter which is
explicitly OSI certified.  That says nothing about the use of the 4-clause
BSD by other licensors (the NetBSD Foundation uses it on their code),
or about the 2-clause BSD which is the subject of the current proposal.

My view is that both the 2-clause and the 4-clause BSD are obviously Open
Source, and that the 2-clause should be certified, since it is known to
be in use and someone has requested it.

-- 
John Cowan  cowan at ccil.org  http://ccil.org/~cowan
Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic
realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers,
philologists, psychologists, biologists and neurologists, along with
whatever blood can be got out of grammarians. - Russ Rymer