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

Bruce Montague


          

Revision: 41645
Legal Notice
Last modified on 2013-05-17 by gabor.

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.

This, and other documents, can be downloaded from http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/

For questions about FreeBSD, read the documentation before contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.

For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.