BSD license
More info
- Creator
- University of California, Berkeley
- Type
- Permissive license
The Berkeley license family that says, roughly: do what you like, keep our copyright line, and don't blame us.
It came into being to distribute the Berkeley Software Distribution and survives in three main variants, named for their number of clauses. The original had four, including an advertising clause: any marketing that mentioned the product also had to credit the university. Once hundreds of contributors demanded the same courtesy for their own names it became unmanageable, and the clause also made the license GPL-incompatible.
Berkeley struck the advertising clause in 1999, giving the three-clause version, sometimes called New BSD. FreeBSD also dropped the ban on using the authors' names for endorsement, and the resulting two-clause variant is in practice the MIT license with the words rearranged.