23 June 2008, 14:14

NetBSD strikes advertising clause from license

The NetBSD Foundation has announced a change in the preferred licence for NetBSD code. The foundation have switched from the previous four-clause BSD licence to the two clause BSD license. The team has already accordingly changed software that is currently part of NetBSD. Along with the clause stipulating that the original author be mentioned, which was already struck from the University of California at Berkeley's original BSD licence in 1999, the "endorsement" clause has also been done away with.

Like FreeBSD and OpenBSD, NetBSD is a free variant of Unix based on Unix version 4.4BSDLite2. Up to now, the licence called on developers to mention the name of the original author when selling software they developed based on BSD code. The BSD licence is generally considered one of the most liberal open source licences. Unlike the GNU GPL, it allows the entire code to be used in proprietary software.

(trk)

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