BSD code is available for anyone to use under what is probably the most permissive license in the history of software development. The license can be summarized as follows:
- Don’t claim you wrote this.
- Don’t blame us if it breaks.
- Don’t use our name to promote your product.
Taken as a whole, this means that you can do almost anything you want with BSD code. (The original BSD license did require that users be notified if a software product included BSD-licensed code, but that requirement was later dropped.) You don’t even need to share any changes with the original authors! People could take BSD and include it in proprietary, open source, or free products.
Instead of a restrictive copyright, or the more permissive but still restricted copyleft, the BSD license is sometimes referred to as copycenter, as in “take this down to the copy center and run off a few for yourself.” Not surprisingly, companies such as Sun Microsystems jumped right on BSD. It was free, it worked, and plenty of new graduates had experience with the technology. One company, BSDi, was formed specifically to take advantage of BSD Unix.
Absolute OpenBSD: UNIX for the practical paranoid / Michael W. Lucas.
Absolute OpenBSD: UNIX for the practical paranoid / Michael W. Lucas.
