Why you should use a BSD style license for your Open Source Project

Bruce Montague

<brucem@alumni.cse.ucsc.edu>

$FreeBSD: doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/bsdl-gpl/article.sgml,v 1.8 2008/10/11 10:43:29 brueffer Exp $

Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 Very Brief Open Source History
3 Unix from a BSD Licensing Perspective
4 The Current State of FreeBSD and BSD Licenses
5 The origins of the GPL
6 The origins of Linux and the LGPL
7 Open Source licenses and the Orphaning Problem
8 What a license cannot do
9 GPL Advantages and Disadvantages
10 BSD Advantages
11 Specific Recommendations for using a BSD license
12 Conclusion
13 Addenda

1 Introduction

This document makes a case for using a BSD style license for software and data; specifically it recommends using a BSD style license in place of the GPL. It can also be read as a BSD versus GPL Open Source License introduction and summary.

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		Very Brief Open Source History