[License-discuss] BSD license, source distributions and interpretations of "retain"

[Michael Bradley]

Suppose Project A is licensed under 3-Clause BSD, and includes that license text at the head of each of its source code files.

Now suppose Project B’s source code is derived from Project A’s source code, but the maintainer of Project B wishes to use a different license. In an effort to avoid confusion, Project B has that different license text at the head of each of its source code files, while Project A's original license text has been moved off to a file bundled in Project B's source distributions, e.g. “licenses/ORIGINAL-PROJECTA-LICENSE.txt”.

Would that be in compliance with the “retain” language in clause #1 of the 3-Clause BSD license? Is there any case law to that effect or to the contrary? References to legal write-ups on this question (or similar) would be appreciated.

Best regards,

--
Michael Bradley, Jr.
@michaelsbradley