Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law

The BSD License Grant

Here is the actual BSD license grant:

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided.... (BSD license.)

I will describe the provided... clause (what is also called a proviso) soon, but first I need to describe just which of the University of California's intellectual property rights were actually being licensed by the first BSD license.

Almost everyone believes that the redistribution and use clause of the BSD license was intended to include all of the exclusive intellectual property rights the University then owned for something called the “Berkeley Software Distribution.” The fact that the BSD license does not expressly list those exclusive rights (e.g., copy, create ...