Re: 4-clause BSD licensed files

"Keith Packard" <[email protected]> Mon, 27 Jan 2020 21:48:41 -0800
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.lib.newlib
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Paul Koning <[email protected]> writes:

> It would make a whole lot of sense to ask for permission to make that
> change, but making it without explicit permission of the copyright
> holder would be incorrect.

Sure, in the usual case you're perfectly correct. However, I think
this is a special case because Berkeley published a statement allowing
people to remove this clause. If the copyright holder were anyone other
than "The Regents of the University of California" we'd be stuck.

Here's a link to that statement, which was made in 1999:

ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.License.Change

        July 22, 1999

        To All Licensees, Distributors of Any Version of BSD:

        As you know, certain of the Berkeley Software Distribution ("BSD") source
        code files require that further distributions of products containing all or
        portions of the software, acknowledge within their advertising materials
        that such products contain software developed by UC Berkeley and its
        contributors.

        Specifically, the provision reads:

        "     * 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."

        Effective immediately, licensees and distributors are no longer required to
        include the acknowledgement within advertising materials.  Accordingly, the
        foregoing paragraph of those BSD Unix files containing it is hereby deleted
        in its entirety.

        William Hoskins
        Director, Office of Technology Licensing
        University of California, Berkeley


Thanks for encouraging me to go and find these actual words -- it's
pretty clear in giving us permission to edit the license in our copy of
the software. And, we have about 74 files which have obviously been
edited in this way, although at least some of those were brought to
newlib through some indirect process and were edited before being added
to newlib.

The statement appears to also give us permission to remove the
advertising clause from the 1987 BSD license, although that is a bit
less clear as it doesn't explicitly state how to do that.

-- 
-keith
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