BSD License "Innocence" Clause Proposal

[Danny Pansters]

Sorry, forgot this part..

On Wednesday 22 March 2006 17:57, you wrote:
> Nope.  The real BSD license gives copyrights to the University of
> California, Berkeley.  Mainly for historical reasons because BSD
> originated from there, but there is a legal reason also.  You see, if
> I Ted Mittelstaedt release software copyright Ted Mittelstaedt, even
> if I give everyone rights to use it, I still retain copyright and
> later on I can change the terms of that copyright.  That is what the
> courts have said I can do.  As a result of this, people, when they use
> my work commercially they will need to get me to sign a piece of paper.
> If I'm not reachable, that's kind of hard.  By giving the copyright

If you use the copyright statement and then quote the (extra) provisions you 
have for distribution, as in

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

[ acceptable conditions like attribution ]

or

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted.
--

then they don't need you to sign anything, well, not for that code with those 
clauses. You are granting redistribution rights which are not granted by 
copyright itself, that's why there's a distribution license. I don't see the 
problem really.

> to the University, it assures any future entity that there will never
> be any question of copyight rights to use the work since the UCB
> obviously
> isn't difficult to find, and is not likely to dry up and disappear.

s/University/FSF and s/BSD/GPL and you have a heated debate :)

> This is why FreeBSD is copyrighted The FreeBSD Project and
> not the individual developers copyrights.

That's certainly not the case for the code used in FreeBSD, only for the 
FreeBSD trademark I think. Look at a random file in src.

> If you retain your own copyright on the
> work then your license might be a BSD-like license, but it's not
> the BSD license.

Dan