[License-review] Dear OSI License Review Committee,

[Richard Fontana]

On Sat, Aug 16, 2025 at 11:17 AM McCoy Smith <mccoy at lexpan.law> wrote:
>
> and how it is different or an improvement upon, for example,
> BSD-4-Clause, which is not OSI approved because of the so-called
> "advertising clause" that this license appears to also contain (it
> appear to require more than reproduction of attribution notices).

Aside: I don't think it's clear that that is *why* BSD-4-Clause is not
OSI approved. At the time that OSI started publishing licenses it
considered to be OSD-conformant, what is now SPDX BSD-4-Clause was
already being actively deprecated in favor of what is now
BSD-3-Clause. As far as I know, no one ever submitted BSD-4-Clause or
any other license with a similar advertising requirement for OSI
approval. Similarly, the Apache Software License version 1.1, which
does not contain an advertising clause, was one of the early licenses
listed by the OSI as OSD-conformant, but version 1.0 (which has an
advertising clause, being a descendant of the BSD licenses) was not.

The view of the FSF is that BSD-4-Clause and Apache-1.0 are
(GPL-incompatible) free software licenses, FWIW. Linux distributions
with FOSS licensing standards (like Debian and Fedora) also do not
treat licenses with advertising clauses as non-FOSS per se.

It's occasionally been suggested before on
license-discuss/license-review that the absence of BSD-4-Clause from
the OSI-approved list signifies a view that the license is not
OSD-conformant, but I think that is questionable. The issue is sort of
waiting to arise if someone were ever to submit something like
BSD-4-Clause or Apache-1.0 for legacy approval.

 Richard