

BSD – The Dark Horse of Open Source (2007) - michaelsbradley
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070114093427179

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greenyoda
"Note/Disclaimer: This discussion is limited to likely effects under
Australian law. Some of the arguments made are of a generic nature and might
be profitably applied in other common law jurisdictions, such as the UK and
the US – but, then again, they might not."

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michaelsbradley
As a result of a discussion I had earlier today, the linked article, and a
somewhat related piece published by the SFLC in 2007[1], I now feel more
confused than I ever have been about the obligations imposed by the 3-Clause
and 2-Clause BSD licenses[2].

Let me pose a hypothetical situation – I would very much appreciate informed
feedback from the HN community:

 _Suppose Project A is licensed under 2 or 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”. Assume that Project B is properly a derivative work,
i.e. exclude the case where B only includes trivial changes to A's sources.

Would Project B be in compliance with the “retain” language in clause #1 of
the 2 or 3-Clause BSD license? Is there any case law to that effect or to the
contrary?_

Additionally, it seems some projects have started including extra notices in
proximity to their BSD licenses. One example off the top of my head is Google
Polymer:

[https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/blob/master/banner.txt](https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/blob/master/banner.txt)

"This code may only be used under the BSD style license found at
[http://polymer.github.io/LICENSE.txt"](http://polymer.github.io/LICENSE.txt")

The actual text of Polymer's license is boilerplate 3-Clause BSD:

[http://polymer.github.io/LICENSE.txt](http://polymer.github.io/LICENSE.txt)

But what are the legal effects of such a notice with respect to derivative and
combined works? Is the appearance of a BSD license deceiving in this case, and
what's really being imposed is a subtle form of copyleft? That's a genuine
question, not intended to be inflammatory.

[1] [https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-
gpl-c...](https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-
collaboration.html)

[2]
[http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause](http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause)

[&]
[http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause](http://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause)

