Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger@example.edu> wrote:
+---------------
| For more information:
| 	http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html
+---------------

Note that this page still contains a small but important omission:

    Dean Hal Varian at the University of California took up the cause,
    and championed it with the administration. In June 1999, after two
    years of discussions, the University of California removed this
    clause from the license of BSD.

    Thus, there is now a new BSD license which does not contain the
    advertising clause.

More importantly, when the Regents of the University of California
approved the change, they also announced that it was *retroactive*
to all pre-existing UCB-developed code. That is, one may safely ignore
the advertising clause in any pre-1999 direct BSD copyright notice,
as you can see from this excerpt from the official announcement
[heavily edited for brevity]:

    July 22, 1999
    To All Licensees, Distributors of Any Version of BSD:

    As you know, certain of the Berkeley Software Distribution ("BSD")
    source code files require that further distributions... acknowledge
    within their advertising materials that such products contain
    software developed by UC Berkeley and its contributors.
    ...

    Effective immediately, licensees and distributors are no longer
    required to include the acknowledgement within advertising materials.
    Accordingly, the foregoing paragraph of those BSD Unix files
    containing it is hereby deleted in its entirety.

    William Hoskins
    Director, Office of Technology Licensing
    University of California, Berkeley

Although, as the above-referenced URL notes, this did not entirely fix
the problem:

    Unfortunately, this does not eliminate the legacy of the advertising
    clause: similar clauses are still present in the licenses of many
    packages which are not part of BSD. The change in license for BSD
    has no effect on the other packages which imitated the old BSD
    license; only the developers who made them can change them.
    ...
    So if you have a favorite package which still uses the BSD license
    with the advertising clause, please ask the maintainer to look at
    this web page, and consider making the change.

Note also that they suggest using the MIT X license instead of the
"new" BSD license, just to avoid accidentally picking up an "old" BSD
license by mistake, though that seems a bit condescending to me.

IMHO & AFAIK, there is no serious reason to prefer one over the other.
If you're adding to something that already uses an "X11-style" license,
just use that one to keep it simple for later developers, and conversely
if you're adding to code with a "new BSD-style" license.


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue			<URL:http://rpw3.org/>
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