The Open Source Alternative: Understanding Risks and Leveraging Opportunities

Chapter 6. Notice Requirements

Almost every open source license contains notice requirements. These always include the obligation to place a copyright notice on distributions, although the placement of the notices, and what type of distributions must include them, vary from license to license.

Notice requirements are not complicated to interpret and are rarely the subject of litigation claims or disputes.^[88] Thus, compliance with them is neither intellectually challenging nor a primary focus of risk management. However, meeting notice requirements is time-consuming and complying with the exact letter of all the notice provisions for a product that embeds many open source modules can be impossible.

For instance, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) license contains this notice requirement:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license contains this:

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.

Some licenses require not only copyright notices and attribution but identification of code modifications, such as the Zope license:

5. If any files are modified, you must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.

This is from the Reciprocal ...