BSD license is a group of permissive open source licenses. The original type of the license comes from the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), which is indicated by the acronym BSD: Berkeley Software Distribution.
Software under a BSD license may be used freely. It is allowed to copy, modify, and distribute it. The only condition is that the copyright notice of the original program must not be removed. Thus, software licensed under a BSD license is also suitable as a template for commercial (semi-proprietary) products.
This license model differs from the GNU General Public License (GPL) in that it does not contain a copyleft: A programmer who modifies a program or library published under a BSD license and then distributes it in binary form is not required to publish the source code. Any redistribution and use in non-compiled or compiled form, with or without modification, must however continue under a BSD license. For this purpose, the BSD license text must be added to the program. For a binary release, for example, this can be done in the documentation; for a release of the source code, the BSD license text can also be inserted directly in the source code.
External links
- Open Source Initiative: The 3-Clause BSD License (Text)
