Re: BSD-4-clause with different development organizations

Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> Mon, 12 Jan 2026 09:20:50 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.legal
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Peter Wienemann <[email protected]> writes:

> Hi,
>
> given a project with a sizable number of files, many of them use a
> BSD-4-clause license but there are variations in the development
> organizations mentioned in clause 3. Is there an elegant way to
> document this in a machine-readable debian/copyright file? Do I have
> to create different stand-alone license stanzas for each variation or
> is there a more efficient way to do it?

I've ran into this a couple of times too.  The BSD license is fairly
clear that you need to retain the copyright notice and the list of
conditions, which include the name of the organization.  As such, as far
as I understand, you really must reproduce the entire license text
verbatim to be compliant.  I've several times wished to express "The
same BSD-3-Clause license but replace Google Inc with Google LLC" to
save space, but I have refrained from doing so.

Better automatic license extraction tool would be nice here, saving us
from this manual work..

/Simon

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