As a global non-profit , the OSI champions software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition OSD , and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement.
Open source software is made by many people and distributed under an OSD-compliant license which grants all the rights to use, study, change, and share the software in modified and unmodified form. Software freedom is essential to enabling community development of open source software.
Skip to main content. This is different from licenses like GPL or Apache 2. The terms of BSD say that contributors to BSD 3 Clause-licensed code cannot be held liable for any damages resulting from modifications or updates to the original work. In addition, any person or company that makes use of code licensed under BSD 3 is prohibited from using the name of the project or its contributors to promote their derivative work without written permission. These are the 4-clause, 2-clause, 1-clause, and 0-clause license variants.
As the names imply, the key differences between them have to do with the number of clauses in the license. An important note: Open source licenses generally have deprecated advertising clauses. So, if you find code under a license with an advertising clause, you may want to consider whether it is up-to-date and secure.
This is the clause that prohibits users from using the name of the project to promote their derivative work s. Finally, the 0-Clause BSD License does not require users to include the license text or copyright notice in their copy or modification of the code.
In other words, it has no requirements whatsoever, making it a public-domain-equivalent license. The popularity of permissive licenses has been growing steadily over the past few years, particularly that of the MIT License and the Apache License 2. In addition, the language of the MIT License is simpler and shorter.
The Apache License 2. This aspect of the license provides legal protection and peace of mind to companies that make use of Apache-licensed code. In contrast, the BSD license is thought to grant some patent rights by implication, and the scope of that license is, at best, unclear.
Secondly, the Apache License requires all users to list out significant changes and modifications to the original code. You do not have to release the source code which has been dynamically linked to an LGPLed library. If you statically link an application with glibc, such as is often required in embedded systems, you cannot keep your application proprietary, that is, the source must be released.
One of the serious problems associated with proprietary software is known as "orphaning". This occurs when a single business failure or change in a product strategy causes a huge pyramid of dependent systems and companies to fail for reasons beyond their control.
Decades of experience have shown that the momentary size or success of a software supplier is no guarantee that their software will remain available, as current market conditions and strategies can change rapidly. A BSD license gives a small company the equivalent of software-in-escrow without any legal complications or costs. If a BSD-licensed program becomes orphaned, a company can simply take over, in a proprietary manner, the program on which they are dependent.
An even better situation occurs when a BSD code-base is maintained by a small informal consortium, since the development process is not dependent on the survival of a single company or product line.
The survivability of the development team when they are mentally in the zone is much more important than simple physical availability of the source code. No license can guarantee future software availability. Although a copyright holder can traditionally change the terms of a copyright at anytime, the presumption in the BSD community is that such an attempt simply causes the source to fork.
The GPL explicitly disallows revoking the license. It has occurred, however, that a company Mattel purchased a GPL copyright cphack , revoked the entire copyright, went to court, and prevailed [2]. That is, they legally revoked the entire distribution and all derivative works based on the copyright. Whether this could happen with a larger and more dispersed distribution is an open question; there is also some confusion regarding whether the software was really under the GPL.
In another example, Red Hat purchased Cygnus, an engineering company that had taken over development of the FSF compiler tools. Cygnus was able to do so because they had developed a business model in which they sold support for GNU software. This enabled them to employ some 50 engineers and drive the direction of the programs by contributing the preponderance of modifications.
A common reason to use the GPL is when modifying or extending the gcc compiler. This is particularly apt when working with one-off specialty CPUs in environments where all software costs are likely to be considered overhead, with minimal expectations that others will use the resulting compiler.
The GPL is also attractive to small companies selling CDs in an environment where "buy-low, sell-high" may still give the end-user a very inexpensive product. It is also attractive to companies that expect to survive by providing various forms of technical support, including documentation, for the GPLed intellectual property world.
A less publicized and unintended use of the GPL is that it is very favorable to large companies that want to undercut software companies. In other words, the GPL is well suited for use as a marketing weapon, potentially reducing overall economic benefit and contributing to monopolistic behavior. The GPL can present a real problem for those wishing to commercialize and profit from software.
For example, the GPL adds to the difficulty a graduate student will have in directly forming a company to commercialize his research results, or the difficulty a student will have in joining a company on the assumption that a promising research project will be commercialized.
For those who must work with statically-linked implementations of multiple software standards, the GPL is often a poor license, because it precludes using proprietary implementations of the standards.
The GPL was intended to not provide a mechanism to develop a standard on which one engineers proprietary products. This does not apply to Linux applications because they do not statically link, rather they use a trap-based API. The GPL attempts to make programmers contribute to an evolving suite of programs, then to compete in the distribution and support of this suite.
This situation is unrealistic for many required core system standards, which may be applied in widely varying environments which require commercial customization or integration with legacy standards under existing non-GPL licenses. Real-time systems are often statically linked, so the GPL and LGPL are definitely considered potential problems by many embedded systems companies.
The GPL is an attempt to keep efforts, regardless of demand, at the research and development stages. This maximizes the benefits to researchers and developers, at an unknown cost to those who would benefit from wider distribution. The GPL was designed to keep research results from transitioning to proprietary products.
This step is often assumed to be the last step in the traditional technology transfer pipeline and it is usually difficult enough under the best of circumstances; the GPL was intended to make it impossible. A BSD style license is a good choice for long duration research or other projects that need a development environment that:. This final consideration may often be the dominant one, as it was when the Apache project decided upon its license:.
Developers tend to find the BSD license attractive as it keeps legal issues out of the way and lets them do whatever they want with the code. In contrast, those who expect primarily to use a system rather than program it, or expect others to evolve the code, or who do not expect to make a living from their work associated with the system such as government employees , find the GPL attractive, because it forces code developed by others to be given to them and keeps their employer from retaining copyright and thus potentially "burying" or orphaning the software.
If you want to force your competitors to help you, the GPL is attractive. A BSD license is not simply a gift.
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