BSD licenses

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BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD license was used for its namesake, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-likeoperating system. The original version has since been revised, and its descendants are referred to as modified BSD licenses.

FreeBSD Documentation LicenseThe FreeBSD Documentation License is the license that covers most of the documentation for the FreeBSDoperating system. LicenseThe license is very similar to the two-clause Simplified BSD License used by the support of FreeBSD; however, it makes the applications of "source code" and "compile" less obscure in the context of documentation. It also includes an obligatory disclaimer about IEEE and Open Group manuscript in some old-fashioned sheets. Copyright 1994-2023 The FreeBSD Project. Redistribution and use in s...

MIT LicenseThe MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts few restrictions on reuse and has high license compatibility. Unlike copyleft software licenses, the MIT License allows reuse within proprietary software, provided that all copies of the software or its substantial portions include a copy of the terms of the MIT License and also a copyright notice. In 2015 and from at least 2020 through 2025, the MIT ...

University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source LicenseThe University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License is a permissive free software license, based on the MIT/X11 license and the 3-clause BSD license. By combining parts of these two licenses, it attempts to be clearer and more concise than either. The license is the result of efforts by a University of Illinois committee set up in 2001. The intention was to create a new license standard for both the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the worldwide software community. It was formally certi...

License compatibilityLicense compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are com...

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