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On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 01:46:45PM +0200, Peter Bex wrote:
  | Hello all,
  |=20
  | What's TNF's official stance on the BSD advertising (3rd) clause?
  | And how about the 4th clause?  (I've noticed that OpenBSD's license doe=
sn't
  | even include that one, at least in OpenSSH)
  | Which exact license is new code preferred to be under?

The NetBSD Foundation's (TNF) license is a "4 clause" Berkeley-style
license, which we use for all code contributed to TNF.  If you write
code and assign the copyright to TNF, this is what will be used.

If TNF changes its license in the future, I would anticipate that
the change would be made retrospectively to all source that TNF
owns the copyright to.



  | I've looked at the website, but there's no statement anywhere.  Also, t=
he
  | source falls under lots of different licenses, even multiple variations=
 of
  | the BSD license within single subprojects.  Shouldn't this be straighte=
ned
  | out or something?

  | I've looked at the website, but there's no statement anywhere.

There's
	http://www.netbsd.org/Goals/redistribution.html
although that currently doesn't have a copy of our current license
in it.  I'll ask the WWW team to rectify that.


  | Also, the source falls under lots of different licenses, even
  | multiple variations of the BSD license within single subprojects.
  | Shouldn't this be straightened out or something?

There's a few points to be made here:


    a)	The NetBSD Project doesn't require that the copyright
	of contributed code be assigned to TNF.
	Other projects do this (e.g, the FSF with GCC), and=20
	this does have various benefits, although it would be
	difficult to change towards this model in a software
	project that is as old and large as ours.


    b)	We don't feel that it is appropriate to (aggressively)
	cajole authors of software to change their license
	conditions to suit our preferred form.

	I, myself, have been at the receiving end of an aggressively
	worded demand to change the license terms on code I wrote,
	with scant justification to the rationale let alone the
	benefits of the change.  I was not Impressed.


    c)	I describe the four clauses of a BSD license as:
		1. Source attribution.
		2. Documentation attribution.
		3. Advertising attribution (if the software is mentioned)
		4. Don't use my "name in vain" without permission.

	There's a variety of reasons why people dislike clause 3,
	including that it increases the workload of third parties
	wishing to incorporate your code in their product.
	It turns out that clause 2 is just as, if not more, onerous
	than clause 3, because most products ship with documentation,
	but not all derived products will mention the specific
	functionality obtained from the NetBSD source.
	(Speaking as a NetBSD release engineer and a third party
	using NetBSD in products).

	Thus, if I was two remove two clauses from a BSD license
	with the intent to make my code "freer" and "easier to use",
	I'd be considering removing clauses 2 & 3, not clauses 3 & 4.

	I have seen some discussion why clause 4 is unnecessary
	in various juristictions.  However, I'm not sure that such
	discussion is relevant on an international basis, and as far
	as I can tell, those involved in the discussion were not
	Intellectual Property lawyers.


    d)	One method to ease the workload of third parties is to
	build & maintain a "license register" of every source file
	in the system, and provide tools that will display the
	copyright & license conditions for the requested files.
	This is a project I would like to see done, and may be
	involved in the implementation of (time permitting).


[I am not a lawyer.  Speaking for myself, not the NetBSD Foundation.]

Cheers,
Luke.

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