BSD variants (was: RE: The Legal Tower of Babel, was Re: WebM license resolution.)

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Mon, 7 Jun 2010, Wilson, Andrew wrote:

> > As an example, I have a book compilation of only 620 manual pages from
> > NetBSD which has 103 unique licenses. 99 are BSD-style licensed and 12
> > MIT-style (some files have multiple licenses). 99 different BSD
> > licenses!
> 
> Do these 99 flavors differ by more than the name of the licensor, or
> are there material changes to the license grant?

The copyright lines are excluded in my counts. But in many cases the 
licensor is listed by name as part of the license and/or disclaimer. So 
I count those different.

But many minor changes in the license, clauses, and/or disclaimers even 
for punctuation. For example (ignore the licensor is different):

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted provided 
that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are duplicated in all 
such forms and that any documentation, advertising materials, and other 
materials related to such distribution and use acknowledge that the 
software was developed by the University of California, Berkeley.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without 
modification, are permitted provided that this notice is retained, the 
conditions in the following notices are met, and terms applying to 
contributors in the following notices also apply to Berkeley Software 
Design, Inc.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without 
modifications, are permitted provided that the above copyright notice 
and this paragraph are duplicated in all such forms and that any 
documentation, advertising materials, and other materials related to 
such distribution and use acknowledge that the software was developed by 
the WIDE Project, Japan.

Redistribution and use, with or without modification, in source and 
binary forms, are permitted provided that this notice is preserved in 
its entirety and due credit is given to the original author and the 
contributors.