Slashdot Mirror
Dispelling BSD License Misconceptions
AlanS2002 writes "Groklaw is hosting an article by Brendan Scott which looks at the misconceptions surrounding the BSD license. From the article: 'We observe that there exists a broad misconception that the BSD permits the licensing of BSD code and modifications of BSD code under closed source licenses. In this paper we put forward an argument to the effect that the terms of the BSD require BSD code and modifications to BSD code to be licensed under the terms of the BSD license. We look at some possible consequences and observe that this licensing requirement could have serious impacts on the unwary.'"
The MIT license looks like it explictly permits relicensing. Would someone more qualified in the legal art then me care to comment?
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
If this turns out to be true, it could have some pretty far-reaching effects, potentially damaging Microsoft, Apple, and even certain F/OSS projects. There seems to be quite the firestorm of controversy over the BSD license lately- perhaps it'd just be better to use a license that isn't so controversial- MIT if you want something to be available for use in closed-source products, or GPL if you don't.
Care about privacy? Read this!
One tidbit seems to be ignored--this would only apply under AUSTRALIAN law, per the article.
But, if true, it might mean that the BSD is indeed "viral" in Australia!
Wonder what Microsoft might have to do about all that old BSD networking code they use if this is true?
This novel interpretation of the BSD license requires various syntax games with the license text that simply aren't supported by common sense interpretation. And yes, while common sense may not be the output of much of any area of law, contract law included, it's still got a lot of weight as input.
It's not a viral license, no matter how much anyone wants to twist their personal interpretation of it. All in all, it's pretty funny, telling the licensors how they actually intended a different outcome than what they, well, intended.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
...personally I'd rather declare any code I produce to belong to the Public Domain or just keep it entirely closed and private. The way law is makes anything else a headache. Seriously, if even lawyers can't agree on anything why does anyone in the Open Source community even bother? Personally I care more about other people being able to benefit from my code than preventing corporations from using it for profit.
SQLite is released to the public domain and it's some damn fine code.
Would that signal the start of the Armageddon? Since surely releasing Windows source code upon humanity would constitute a plague of some sort.
They seem to be saying this:
1) The BSD license clause 3 says the FOLLOWING conditions must apply.
2) They wonder if "apply" means "apply" or something else, like "apple" or "penguin".
3) They note that one of the FOLLOWING conditions is the warranty.
4) They wonder if one of the PRECEDING conditions (clause 2) ought to be handled the same way as the the warranty.
In a narrowly construed legal sense they may have a point.
In a human being sense, if anyone has ever wondered why we all hate lawyers and think they are wankers, this is pretty much it.
It is, of course, impossible to create an unambigous document, and yet lawyers pretend to be able to do this, and then make a fortune out of their failures.
No one, ever, anywhere, has ever had any question as to what the BSD license means. So clearly there is a valid and correct reading that means what everyone knows it to mean. So clearly any reading that completely reverses that meaning must be making a mistake somewhere.
This post, by the way, can be interpreted as a love sonnet addressed to a musk ox, if you look at it closely enough and make up the meaning of a sufficiently large number of words, and wonder when I say, "it is, of course, impossible to create an unambigous document" if I really mean, "misey were the borogoves, and the momrath outrabe."
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
So they are not relicensing the BSD licensed components. They are providing those parts of the software under the license of which they were required and they are doing all they are required to use that code by providing the license in the documentation. The power of this is that the BSD license doesn't require the source code to be released to the user (and Brendan Scott, the author of the paper, recognises this in section 7.3) so the company can keep their modifications secret.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Call a spade a spade. It's not a 'novel interpretation', it's FUD.
Someone who want all software to be 'open' only in the GPL notion is trying to spread FUD that the truely free BSD license also has the same viral restrictions. Don't buy it, don't spread it. It's FUD.
To the author of this crap 'interpretation': If you want your software under GPL, then write it that way, but don't try to spread crap about the BSD license.
Personally, I think that this is just an attempt to make the BSD license somewhat equivalent to the GPL just so that people will use the GPL more. After all, we all know that the GNU Foundation has gotten really active with regards to activism:
h tml
/. (yes, I know that polls here aren't exactly accurate, but it does provide a indicator).
http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/06/12/31/010221.s
And the BSD/MIT licenses are the GPL's nearest competitor according to a poll here at
http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1364&aid=-1
All this is is twisted lawyers, writing twisted conclusions based on twisted sophistry. It is nonsense.
Personally I care more about other people being able to benefit from my code than preventing corporations from using it for profit.
The problem comes when a company claims "ownership" of your code and then determines who benefits and under what contitions. That's what happens when you don't worry enough to make things right.
A great example of such a theft is Macsyma(tediously detailed article that's nice but misses the point), the grand-daddy of Maple, MathCAD, Mathematica and many other symbolic algebra systems. It was developed, largely at public expense by people who expected the public to be able to have it. Instead, the results were "commercialized" in the 80's. A single copy of the original code(much better history, as you would expect from a free software project) survived thanks to the efforts of Bill Schelter, a GNU Common Lisp author and one of the first to port GCC to i386. Schelter managed to convince the DOE to let him legally distribute that code ... 20 years after it had been stolen from the public. Since then, development has been speedy and it will not be long before the quality matches or exceeds current commercial packages. The next time you spend a hundred bucks on one of it's commercial derivatives, remember that you might have had a free version a decade ago.
So, before you freely give your life's effort to others, you might consider what they will really do to other people with it and chose an explicit license that suits your real tastes. The GPL is the most common choice made and there's a reason for that. The same old assholes are up to new tricks, like "trusted computing" that are designed to lock everyone but themselves out of the market. In the future, if they have their way, you will not be able to run your code on commercial hardware. Is that the kind of thing you want to support in any way?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
He doesn't even provide anything to try to back up his crazy claim, he just keeps repeating his conclusion that "you must distribute it under the BSD license" under all these circumstances. The closest thing he gets is claiming that the BSD license doesn't explicitly permit re-licensing. But copyright doesn't have anything to do with licensing, so its totally irrelivant. The BSD license grants you the copyright granted rights that normally are reserved for the author, if you obey the terms. Applying your own license terms later on has nothing to do with copyright, and hence the author of the software has no right to stop you. The GPL prevents you from using your own license not because of some magical "you can't relicense" part of copyright law, but because the GPL explicitly says you can't in the license.
I just spoke to someone I know in UC Berkeley administration about this situation and they told me the following. Please note that I am paraphrasing here and none of this is to be taken as an official statement by the University of California.
The spirit of the license is exactly as people have interpreted it. It is not intended to limit or hinder people in any way. On the contrary, it is fully intended that their products be freely used, modified, and distributed. That's what academic research is all about. Berkeley has neither the time nor energy nor desire to chase people down. They just want credit for doing the work.
In addition, most of Berkeley's projects are government-funded. As such, they are not generally permitted to make any profit from the work. It has to be made public and people have to be allowed to extend it for their own purposes. The essence of public research is to benefit society as a whole, not just the corporate sector.
As for the question of third-party derivative works being used to make a profit, there is nothing stated in the license to prohibit such acts. Thus, it would seem to be legal. However, it could be argued that doing so is against the spirit of the license. Whether or not Berkeley could enforce that spirit in a court of law (assuming they even care to do so) is another matter.
If anybody wants an official statement, they should contact Berkeley's legal department.
Look, when I release software under a BSD-like license, my intent as the owner of the work is to do the following:
(1) Permit people to do whatever they want with the software--including relicensing the software, so long as
(2) if you use my software, you don't then plaster my name all over it as if I endorce whatever cause or crappy software you're creating, and
(3) you don't sue my ass if and when the software you downloaded from me breaks.
Basically, do what you want--just leave me out of it.
In one sense the article is correct: in imposing a new license you cannot remove the old one. But as the intent of the old license is to cover my ass and keep my name around so people know what sort of a cool dude I am, so long as the new license also covers my ass and keeps my name around so people know what sort of a cool dude I am, I don't see the problem--either from a common-sense perspective or from a legal one.
It seems that this lawyer has not been trained in computer science because he is glossing over an important detail of the license to reach his incorrect conclusion. The BSD license says (using the author's numbering and my emphasis):
"2 Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
3 * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
4 * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
5 * Neither the name of the [organization] nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission."
The license requires, per clauses 2-4, that a user reproduce (a) the copyright notice, (b) the list of conditions and (c) the disclaimer of the original license. The author reads this as requiring that the entire BSD license be reproduced in any redistrubtion or use of the code. But this is only true if (a), (b) and (c) comprise the entirety of the BSD license. I argue that they do not!
The key question is, "What is the 'list of conditions' that must be reproduced?" The author incorrectly claims that [2] is part of the list of conditions that must be maintained by a user, which would create a viral mechanism that this paper describes.
It is obvious from [2]'s use of the phrase "the following conditions" and the fact that [3, 4, 5] are preceded by asterisks and use the phrase "this list of conditions" that [2] is not intended to be part of the list of conditions. The list of conditions only consists of [3, 4, 5]. Therefore, redistributors / users are not required to maintain the original grant of the license [2] in their use or redistribution of the code.
The flaw in the author's argument is that he is incorrectly including the original grant of the license [2] into the list of conditions [3, 4, 5]. The license truly only requires that users reproduce clauses [1, 3, 4, 5, 6] of the BSD license in their redistrubtions or use.
Let's take a look:
So long as you include the disclaimer as required, and you don't use the author's name in vain, you can do as you like.There is no part of the license that says that you cannot distribute modified forms under more restrictive licensing, provided that you also perform the acts required by the BSD license and require the same of any sub-licensees that distribute. There is no part of the license that says that you cannot distirbute UNmodified forms under more restrictive licensing, but presumably anyone receiving a copy from you under more restrictive licensing could figure out that you obtained it from a source that merely required adherence to the BSD license, throw away the copy you provided and get their own.
In general, acts that are not specified as prohibited in a contract (in this case the license is a contractural term. You are agreeing to abide by the license in return for being provided value in the form of the code covered by the license) are permitted (modulo exceptions that aren't worthy of mention here). Since sublicensing is not mentioned, it is permitted - provided the original conditions are always met by anyone redistributing and/or using the code.
Even better than shouting down potentially valid arguments that are nevertheless dangerous ideas, let's all plug our ears and LALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALA!! !!!!!!
True, but the BSD license goes further than the disclaimer and attribution: "Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.". That's the viral bit. Viral has nothing to do with giving back to the community, it is simply a question of whether the license can be removed by someone that modifies the code. BSD can't be. End of story. The interesting question here is what the implications are IF the code does find its way into "the community". What effect does that have on any copyright claims?
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
The BSD license isn't viral, don't get confused. It is the viral nature of the GPL that restricts how you can license your additions.
If you take and modify a piece of GPLed code (that you did not write in the first place), and you wish to distribute or sell the resulting source and/or binaries, you are required under the GPL to basically licence your additions under the same terms, including making your modifications available in source form. The only way around the requirement is if you contact all the authors that created the original work and get permission from all of them to operate on the source under a different license (that is, for the original authors to re-issue the same source to you under a different license). This is nearly impossible for very large GPLed projects but, of course, very easy for small projects since there are only a handful of original authors. Some projects require that submissions sign over their rights to the project to give the project the ability to change the license it is distributed under (I believe the GCC project does this, for example, and MySQL forked off a proprietary dist using the same method). Baring this permission you can only modify the code under the terms of the license.
If you take and modify a piece of BSD code you are NOT required under the BSD licence to put your additions under the same terms. You can do whatever you want with your derived work, including selling it without disclosing your modifications. All the BSD license does is prevent you from removing the BSD copyright and licensing lines from the source code, and requires you to identify in documentation that your code was derived from BSD. In particular, this means that you can add whatever conditions you like to the combined (derivative) work, as long as they are not contrary to the original BSD license. That is, you cannot remove the requirement that your documentation contain a copy of the BSD copyright notice and licence. But it certainly does not in any way require that that be the ONLY copyright notice and license pertaining to the derived work.
Any third party is welcome to take the original BSD code and do whatever they want to it under only the terms of the BSD license. But if they want to take your modified work they have to adhere to both the BSD license and your own.
Only an idiot would think otherwise. I swear, where these people get their ideas is beyond me.
It's that simple. Think of the BSD license simply as published pure science... that is the closest parallel to its intent.
-Matt
Please point to the clause that allows you to do this.
Condition number 1 says redistribution of the source code must retain the license (copyright, conditions, disclaimer). Condition number 2 says that redistribution of binaries must be accompanied by the license.
You may of course, rudely wrap the BSD license inside of the GPL. Examples would be distributing a package under the GPL even though the software inside it was BSD. You cannot restrict the user from redistributing the package contents under the terms BSD license, so attempting to place GPL restrictions on the package would be rather pointless. But I've seen people try.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
That's effectively what Berkeley did when AT&T sued them over the release of the BSD Unix source code - they countered by pointing out that AT&T had stripped BSD copyright headers from a number of files included in System V. Berkeley pointed out that AT&T were welcome to restribute their code as a binary only, commercial product, but that the copyright stripping in the separately licensed source release contravened the BSD license.