Appendix B. Referenced Open Source Licenses

The Open Source Initiative (OSI; http://www.opensource.org) is a nonprofit organization with responsibility for approving open source licenses as applied to software. Currently there are more than 50 OSI-approved licenses. Included here are the major licenses referenced by essays in this volume.

The BSD License

The following is a BSD license template. To generate your own license, change the values of OWNER, ORGANIZATION, and YEAR from their original values as given here, and substitute your own.

Note: the advertising clause in the license appearing on BSD Unix files was officially rescinded by the Director of the Office of Technology Licensing of the University of California on July 22, 1999. He states that clause 3 is “hereby deleted in its entirety.”

Note the new BSD license is thus equivalent to the MIT License, except for the no-endorsement final clause.

<OWNER> = Regents of the University of California<ORGANIZATION> = University of California, Berkeley<YEAR> = 1998

In the original BSD license, both occurrences of the phrase “COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS” in the disclaimer read “REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS.”

Here is the license template:

Copyright (c) <YEAR>, <OWNER>All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

  • Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following ...

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