4-clause BSD licensed files

[email protected] ("Keith Packard") Mon, 27 Jan 2020 17:10:30 -0800

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.lib.newlib
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

I'm reviewing the newlib licenses as I try to fix the copyright status
in a debian package and have come across a fairly long list of files
that still have the old BSD advertising clause:

 * 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
 *    must display the following acknowledgement:
 *	This product includes software developed by the University of
 *	California, Berkeley and its contributors.

A (much shorter) list of files contains this clause in an even older
form:

 * (2) distributions including binaries display
 * the following acknowledgement:  ``This product includes software
 * developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors''
 * in the documentation or other materials provided with the distribution
 * and in all advertising materials mentioning features or use of this
 * software.

This isn't mentioned in COPYING.NEWLIB, which seems like a fairly
serious omission as it impacts where and how newlib can be used.

I believe all of the affected files are copyright The Regents of the
University of California, and as that organization has routinely
re-licensed code from 4-clause to 3-clause licenses, I'm wondering if it
would be reasonable to simply edit the affected files and remove this
clause. It's already been done in about 74 files, which contain
license clauses 1, 2 and 4 but no clause 3.

Here's how I counted the files containing this phrasing:

        $ git grep -l -i 'All advertising material' | wc -l
        188

I'm working on a python script to automatically extract copyright
messages from the newlib source with the goal of formatting that in
Debian's machine-readable form. I can also generate an updated
COPYING.NEWLIB file if that's of interest.

-- 
-keith

signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 832 B)