Communication skills

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

"Chris Travers" <chris.travers at gmail.com> writes:
> Ok so what do you do when someone asks whether the FreeBSD License is
> OSI approved?

"The FreeBSD License" is entirely Russ's invention.  The FreeBSD
Project claims a compilation copyright on the FreeBSD operating
system, which is a composite work consisting of ~20,000 source files
totalling nearly 9 MLOC plus untold man pages, Makefiles, shell
scripts and other, obtained from many different sources under many
different licenses, including the GPL, the CDDL, the BSD License, the
New BSD License, the MIT License, the Beerware License and the
Simplified BSD License.  The FreeBSD Project licenses that work as a
whole under a license which is similar but not identical to the
Simplified BSD License (the dislcaimer has an additional paragraph
disclaiming responsibility for the views of the individual authors)

There is a "FreeBSD Documentation License" which is derived from the
BSD license and resembles the Simplified BSD License in that it has
two clauses and a nearly identical disclaimer, but unlike the
Simplified BSD License, it explicitly defines "source code" and
"compiled form" (in terms relevant to DocBook documents).

Unlike Russ, I know whereof I speak: I have been a member of the
FreeBSD project for close to ten years, during which I have
contributed significant amounts of both source code (mostly under the
New BSD License, but lately also under the Simplified BSD License) and
documentation (under the FreeBSD Documentation License), and
occasionally served as an officer of the project.  My submission of
the Simplified BSD License, however, is entirely unrelated to my
position, past or present, in the FreeBSD Project.

To provide a bit of history, the first time I ever used the Simplified
BSD License was when I implemented PAM authentication for OpenSSH as
part of FreeBSD's move to PAM back in 2002.  My contract with NAI
required me to use the New BSD License, but the OpenSSH developers
insisted that they would only accept my code under the Simplified BSD
License, and NAI made an exception.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav
Senior Software Developer
Linpro AS - www.linpro.no