[License-review] Dear OSI License Review Committee,

[McCoy Smith]

On 8/17/2025 11:53 AM, Richard Fontana via License-review wrote:
> 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.

Yeah I probably over spoke. There are a couple of "badgeware" OSI 
approved licenses (e.g., APL-1.0; CPAL-1.0) although approved quite a 
long time ago ('00s). And I'm not sure there's any OSD issue with those; 
there are more practical issues that might counsel against further 
"badgeware" licenses being approved.

I don't recall BSD-4-Clause ever being submitted or discussed in the 
past, although you'd need to unzip all the archives and search them to 
find out for sure.