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Re: BSD Protection License



On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 05:39:29PM -0400, Simon Law wrote:
> 3. Modification and redistribution under closed license.
>    You may modify your copy or copies of the Program, and distribute
>    the resulting derivative works, provided that you meet the
>    following conditions:
>    a) The copyright notice and disclaimer on the Program must be reproduced
>       and included in the source code, documentation, and/or other materials
>       provided in a manner in which such notices are normally distributed.
>    b) The derivative work must be clearly identified as such, in order that
>       it may not be confused with the original work.
>    c) The license under which the derivative work is distributed must
>       expressly prohibit the distribution of further derivative works.
> 
> 	Clause 3c apparently violates DFSG 3.  Here, we are now allowed
> to distribute a derived work under the same terms as the license of the
> original software.  This looks non-free to me.

It looks like the intent is to allow distributing modified versions as
long as you follow all of the conditions of section 3 *or* all of the
conditions of section 4.  The license might not actually say that, though.

I wonder why an ugly mandatory-changelog clause was added.  One reason I
like the BSD license is that it doesn't put a lot of requirements on code
reuse--no mandatory source release and no mandatory changelogs.  (Besides,
good programming practices shouldn't be mandated by licenses.)

This license really has little to do with the BSD license, though.  I think
claiming association with it is bordering on deceptive ...

-- 
Glenn Maynard



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