Questions about the two-clause BSD license

Pimm Hogeling pimmhogeling at gmail.com
Mon Oct 19 00:50:57 UTC 2009


Thanks for both your responds.

Dag-Erling Smørgrav:
> Like who?
It doesn't matter who. All I'm saying is, every restriction in a
license could scare off people from using work under the terms of that
license. Because of that, I believe it's interesting to see what could
be stripped from the license.

Dag-Erling Smørgrav:
> Because the recipient of a piece of software derived from BSD-licensed
> software still has the right to redistribute the BSD-licensed parts,
> however awkward that might be.  In theory, I could disassemble my wife's
> iPod, copy the firmware from the flash chip, somehow extract the
> BSD-licensed bits (which are pretty substantial, especially when you
> include code under other similar licenses, such as OpenSSL) and stick
> them on my web site.
So essentially, the license is copyleft? Receiving a work that
includes a part released under a BSD license gives you the freedom to
redistribute that part?

Dag-Erling Smørgrav:
> I don't understand this part.  Are you saying that you want attribution
> only for source distributions, but not for binary distributions?
I'm saying I want to obligate licensees to put a copyright notice, in
the documentation/license file along with a binary form. Simply
because contributers might want this. However, if the source code is
available "in the same way through the same place", that source code
will contain the copyright notice, too. In that case, I don't see the
point in putting the notice in the binary form as well. So in
conclusion, if the source code is available, I don't see why the
notice should be included in the binary form as well.

Chuck Swiger:
> If you're talking about your own works, you are free to license them
> under whatever terms you please.  If you're talking about someone
> else's work which is already under the 2-clause BSD license, then all
> of the clauses are functional.
It's all my own work.



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