Is BSD licence really open source?

Syth

I was looking over the OSI's definition of open source and the BSD licence.

However the version of the BSD licence doesn't seem to meet all the requirments for being an open source licence. Specifically, it doesn't seem to require one to give out source code. Why the descrepancy?

sceptre

AFAIk the BSD license (which like the X11 license is a prime example of a non-copyleft license) was left that way because the regents of the Uni of California wanted to release it under a license with permission to redistribute and modify and also to apply additional restrictions to it as any future developer saw fit. Mostly I suspect, because of the adevertising clause they eventually dropped, which they thought they might want to extend in the future if they could sell bits of it. And they thought that it would be popular with developers who might want to release their work and not release the source code for it or just sell it and not release the source (making BSD more popular due to more apps being available for it though of course it didn't work out like that when Linux hit the scene).

Of course the license led to the USL v BSDi copyright case (AT&T took BSD to court) which effectively hampered BSD for a few years, partly led to Linux being developed and certainly led to Linux taking off.

That's my understanding of it anyway, though I'll happily defer to someone who knows more about BSD.

L1011

Requirement to give out source code of modifications does not make a licence OSS or not

The only issue with the BSD/MIT licences is the now long since gone three clause licence demanding recognition. You still see it some software with "Contains software copyright of the regents of the Univesity of California" on

In my eyes, the GPL is barely opensource, considering the huge restriction on derived works (dynamically linking not allowed??). As a result, I never contribute new code (other than patches required to make stuff build on BeOS, or specifially BeOS/PPC these days) to a GPL project.

The two clause, and I think even the three clause, BSD licence are OSI valid though.

aolXFT

The first part of the BSD License(whether original or modified), is that the licensee may redistribute the source. You physically can't redistribute the source if you don't have it, so it is implicit that they recieve the source. The BSD License is pretty much equivlent to putting the SW in the public domain. It means that anyone can do whatever they like with the software except say they wrote it.

MYOB wrote:

In my eyes, the GPL is barely opensource, considering the huge restriction on derived works (dynamically linking not allowed??).

I'm not sure where you're getting that from. Perhaps you're confusing it with the LGPL in which you aren't allowed to STATICLY link your sw with non-(L)GPL software? Most GPL software is Dynamicly linked.

L1011

Stallman has said that dynamic linkage to a GPL (not LGPL, or anything else) library is a derived work. Static linkage obviously is a derived work,but *dynamic*?

As a result, some projects use the GPL with an extra clause, and of course theres the LGPL.

osmethod

A bit of the history might help...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License

osmethod