Initially, the "obnoxious BSD advertising clause," as it was referred to by GPL advocates, was used only for the BSD UNIX license. That did not cause any major problems because it was only necessary to include a single sentence of acknowledgment in any advertisement.
However, the fact that other software developers did not copy the clause verbatim, but replaced the phrase "University of California" with the name of their own organization or persons involved in it, resulted in a proliferation of slightly different licenses and a consequently serious problem when many such programs were assembled to form a larger work or an operating system. For example, if an operating system or other program required fifty slightly different acknowledgment sentences, each naming a different developer or group of developers, such advertising alone might require a full page. Not only would this be very tedious reading, but it could also be costly.
In June 1999, after two years of discussion, the Office of Technology Licensing at UCB finally proclaimed: "Effective immediately, licensees and distributors are no longer required to include the acknowledgment within advertising materials. Accordingly, the foregoing paragraph of those BSD Unix files containing it is hereby deleted in its entirety."
This was clearly very useful. However, it could not eliminate the legacy of the advertising clause, as similar clauses still exist in the licenses of many programs that followed the old BSD license; only the developers of such packages can change them.
Examples of
Below are three examples of
(3)a template of a
(1)The BSD license as it is used by the FreeBSD Unix operating system:
Copyright
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
1.Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2.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.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE FREEBSD PROJECT "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE FREEBSD PROJECT OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT,
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