I have a great concern related to the validity of the BSD license. I think this license is preempted by the copyright law itself.
When the license (http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/license.html) says: "Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:" it is quite clear that some kind of conditions are imposed on the person that wants to distribute this work with (or without) modifications (i.e. derivative work). This would mean that the original author conditions contributing author's exclusive rights. This is not possible by definition. In order for the derivative to be distributed at all, the original author and the contributing author have to form a contract, a binding legal form, to agree on the distribution of the derivative work. This makes this license quite clearly a contract. But now comes the really scary part. Although the contributing author might choose a different license for the derivative work, he must obey the original, BSD license, in all respects. The license demand following conditions to be met: --------------------------- 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 2. 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. 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors. 4. Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. --------------------------- If the new license the contributing author has chosen for the redistribution doesn't allow the recipient to distribute, nothing happens at all (copyright is simply not involved in any way). However, if the new license permits the distribution of any kind (intact, modified, source, binary or a combination), the conditions listed above and the original copyright notice have to appear as demanded by the original author. The intended effect of this imposing the "use the same conditions" requirement for *all* future successor authors and not just the two original contracting parties (authors in privity), is a "universal privity", where original contractual terms are binding on all third party strangers to the original author. Since the BSD license terms are about copyright matters and enforced under state laws, this is forbidden by Congress in section 301. I think we can safely say that BSD license is indeed preempted by the Copyright Act. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
