The NetBSD Foundation Moves to a Two Clause BSD License

[Alistair Crooks <agc%netbsd.org@localhost>]

The NetBSD Foundation Moves to a Two Clause BSD License
=======================================================

Following on from a vote amongst the membership of the NetBSD
Foundation, and in recognition of the changing face of software
licensing, the Foundation has changed its recommended license to be a
2 clause BSD license.  A template version of this new license is
included at the bottom of this email.  This recommended license is the
one that the Foundation strongly encourages its contributors to use
when assigning copyright to the Foundation.

At the same time, all the code which was contributed to the NetBSD
Foundation has been modified to use the new 2-clause NetBSD license.

The change in license has come about because of a number of factors:

+ we have seen organisations and people concerned about the old clause
3 (the advertising clause) in the license, to the extent where NetBSD
code could not be used in commercial products; the new license means
that these concerns are no longer valid

+ UCB moved some time ago to remove clause 3 from the code
contributed to UCB; this change mirrors that one

+ we have seen some instances where clause 3 was ignored by groups
and organisations

+ the members of the NetBSD Foundation (i.e. its developers) no
longer considered clause 4 (the "endorsement" clause) to be useful
in today's software world

Martin Husemann has gone through our trees and modified the licences,
where applicable.  The first pass of this sweep changed over 5900
files in src alone.  The src diffs were more than 5.5 MB.  The final
number of files was 7104.  We believe that all changes are correct
(they were proof-read prior to being applied), but there is always the
chance that some have been missed, particularly some which were
originally contributed to TNF with a 3 clause license, or which may
contain typos meaning that our scripts could not identify them
properly.  If you (the user community) do find any of these, please
could you let us know about them.  Our thanks to Martin for this
massive piece of work.

Third parties are encouraged to change the license on any files which
have a 4-clause license contributed to the NetBSD Foundation to a
2-clause license. We would also encourage you to inform us about these
files, so that we can continue to track the many places in which NetBSD
is used.

So the NetBSD Foundation is today asking its contributors to use
the new 2 clause NetBSD license in any software that is contributed,
since we firmly believe that it serves the NetBSD community - its
users and developers and contributers, commercial entities and
academic research - in the best manner possible.

Alistair Crooks
President
The NetBSD Foundation


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