| http://openbsd.org/ |
| |
| OpenBSD* Copyright Policy |
| ________________________________________ |
| - Goal |
| Copyright law is complex, OpenBSD* policy is simple - OpenBSD strives to maintain the spirit |
| of the original Berkeley Unix copyrights. |
| OpenBSD can exist as it does today because of the example set by the Computer Systems Research |
| Group at Berkeley and the battles which they and others fought to create a relatively |
| un-encumbered Unix source distribution. |
| The ability of a freely redistributable "Berkeley" Unix to move forward on a competitive |
| basis with other operating systems depends on the willingness of the various development |
| groups to exchange code amongst themselves and with other projects. Understanding the legal |
| issues surrounding copyright is fundamental to the ability to exchange and re-distribute code, |
| while honoring the spirit of the copyright and concept of attribution is fundamental to |
| promoting the cooperation of the people involved. |
| - The Berkeley* Copyright |
| The Berkeley* copyright poses no restrictions on private or commercial use of the software |
| and imposes only simple and uniform requirements for maintaining copyright notices in |
| redistributed versions and crediting the originator of the material only in advertising. |
| For instance: |
| * Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1990, 1991, 1993 |
| * The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. |
| * |
| * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without |
| * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions |
| * are met: |
| * 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright |
| * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. |
| * 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright |
| * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the |
| * documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. |
| * 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software |
| * must display the following acknowledgement: |
| * This product includes software developed by the University of |
| * California, Berkeley and its contributors. |
| * 4. Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors |
| * may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software |
| * without specific prior written permission. |
| * |
| * THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND |
| * ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE |
| * IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE |
| * ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE REGENTS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE |
| * FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL |
| * DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS |
| * OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) |
| * HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT |
| * LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY |
| * OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF |
| * SUCH DAMAGE. |
| * |
| Berkeley rescinded the 3rd term (the advertising term) on 22 July 1999. Verbatim copies |
| of the Berkeley license in the OpenBSD tree have that term removed. In addition, many |
| 3rd-party BSD-style licenses consist solely of the first two terms. |
| Because the OpenBSD copyright imposes no conditions beyond those imposed by the Berkeley |
| copyright, OpenBSD can hope to share the same wide distribution and applicability as the |
| Berkeley distributions. It follows however, that OpenBSD cannot include material which |
| includes copyrights which are more restrictive than the Berkeley copyright, or must |
| relegate this material to a secondary status, i.e. OpenBSD as a whole is freely |
| redistributable, but some optional components may not be. |
| - Copyright Law |
| While the overall subject of copyright law is far beyond the scope of this document, some |
| basics are in order. Under the current copyright law, copyrights are implicit in the |
| creation of a new work and reside with the creator, unless otherwise assigned. In general |
| the copyright applies only to the new work, not the material the work was derived from, |
| nor those portions of the derivative material included in the new work. |
| Copyright law admits to three general categories of works: |
| Original Work |
| A new work that is not derived from an existing work. |
| Derivative Work |
| Work that is derived from, includes or amends existing works. |
| Compilations |
| A work that is a compilation of existing new and derivative works. |
| The fundamental concept is that there is primacy of the copyright, that is a copyright of a |
| derivative work does not affect the rights held by the owner of the copyright of the original |
| work, rather only the part added. Likewise the copyright of a compilation does not affect the |
| rights of the owner of the included works, only the compilation as an entity. |
| It is vitally important to understand that copyrights are broad protections as defined by |
| national and international copyright law. The "copyright notices" usually included in source |
| files are not copyrights, but rather notices that a party asserts that they hold copyright |
| to the material or to part of the material. Typically these notices are associated with |
| license terms which grant permissions subject to copyright law and with disclaimers that |
| state the position of the copyright holder/distributor with respect to liability surrounding |
| use of the material. |
| - Permissions - the flip side |
| Because copyrights arise from the creation of a work, rather than through a registration process, |
| there needs to be a practical way to extend permission to use a work beyond what might be allowed |
| by "fair use" provisions of the copyright laws. |
| This permission typically takes the form of a "release" or "license" included in the work, which |
| grants the additional uses beyond those granted by copyright law, usually subject to a variety of |
| conditions. At one extreme sits "public domain" where the originator asserts that he imposes no |
| restrictions on use of the material, at the other restrictive clauses that actually grant no |
| additional rights or impose restrictive, discriminatory or impractical conditions on use of the |
| work. |
| Again, an important point to note is that the release and conditions can only apply to the |
| portion of the work that was originated by the copyright holder - the holder of a copyright |
| on a derivative work can neither grant additional permissions for use of the original work, |
| nor impose more restrictive conditions for use of that work. |
| Because copyright arises from the creation of a work and not the text or a registration process, |
| removing or altering a copyright notice or associated release terms has no bearing on the |
| existence of the copyright, rather all that is accomplished is to cast doubt upon whatever rights |
| the person making the modifications had to use the material in the first place. Likewise, adding |
| terms and conditions in conflict with the original terms and conditions does not supersede them, |
| rather it casts doubts on the rights of the person making the amendments to use the material and |
| creates confusion as to whether anyone can use the amended version or derivatives thereof. |
| Finally, releases are generally binding on the material that they are distributed with. This means |
| that if the originator of a work distributes that work with a release granting certain permissions, |
| those permissions apply as stated, without discrimination, to all persons legitimately possessing |
| a copy of the work. That means that having granted a permission, the copyright holder can not |
| retroactively say that an individual or class of individuals are no longer granted those permissions. |
| Likewise should the copyright holder decide to "go commercial" he can not revoke permissions already |
| granted for the use of the work as distributed, though he may impose more restrictive permissions in |
| his future distributions of that work. |
| - Specific Cases |
| This section attempts to summarize the position of OpenBSD relative to some commonly encountered |
| copyrights. |
| Berkeley* |
| The Berkeley copyright is the model for the OpenBSD copyright. It retains the rights of the |
| copyright holder, while imposing minimal conditions on the use of the copyrighted material. |
| Material with Berkeley copyrights, or copyrights closely adhering to the Berkeley model can |
| generally be included in OpenBSD. |
| AT&T* |
| As part of its settlement with AT&T*, Berkeley included an AT&T copyright notice on some of the |
| files in 4.4BSD lite and lite2. The terms of this license are identical to the standard Berkeley |
| license. |
| Additionally, OpenBSD includes some other AT&T code with non-restrictive copyrights, such as the |
| reference implementation of awk. |
| Caldera* |
| Caldera* (now known as the SCO group) is the current owner of the Unix code copyrights. On 23 |
| January 2002, the original Unix code (versions 1 through seven, including 32V) was freed by Caldera. |
| This code is now available under a 4-term BSD-style license. As a result, it is now possible to |
| incorporate real Unix code into OpenBSD (though this code is quite old and generally requires significant |
| changes to bring it up to date). |
| DEC*, Sun*, other manufacturers/software houses. |
| In general OpenBSD does not include material copyrighted by manufacturers or software houses. |
| Material may be included where the copyright owner has granted general permission for reuse |
| without conditions, with terms similar to the Berkeley copyright, or where the material is the |
| product of an employee and the employer's copyright notice effectively releases any rights they |
| might have to the work. |
| Carnegie-Mellon* (CMU, Mach) |
| The Carnegie-Mellon copyright is similar to the Berkeley copyright, except that it requests that |
| derivative works be made available to Carnegie-Mellon. Because this is only a request and not a |
| condition, such material can still be included in OpenBSD. It should be noted that existing |
| versions of Mach are still subject to AT&T copyrights, which prevents the general distribution |
| of Mach sources. |
| Apache* |
| The original Apache* copyright is similar to the Berkeley copyright, except that it stipulates |
| that products derived from the code may not have "Apache" in their name. The purpose of this |
| clause is to avoid a situation in which another party releases a modified version of the code |
| named in such a way to make users think that it is the "official" version. This is not an issue |
| with OpenBSD because OpenBSD is a Compilation, and not a Derived Work. Source code published under |
| version 2 of the Apache license cannot be included into OpenBSD. As a consequence, OpenBSD now |
| maintains its own version of Apache based on version 1.3.29. The OpenBSD version includes many |
| enhancements and bugfixes. |
| ISC* |
| The ISC* copyright is functionally equivalent to a two-term BSD copyright with language removed |
| that is made unnecessary by the Berne convention. This is the preferred license for new code |
| incorporated into OpenBSD. A sample license is included in the source tree as |
| /usr/src/share/misc/license.template. |
| GNU* General Public License, GPL, LGPL, copyleft, etc. |
| The GNU* Public License and licenses modeled on it impose the restriction that source code must |
| be distributed or made available for all works that are derivatives of the GNU copyrighted code. |
| While this may be a noble strategy in terms of software sharing, it is a condition that is |
| typically unacceptable for commercial use of software. As a consequence, software bound by the |
| GPL terms can not be included in the kernel or "runtime" of OpenBSD, though software subject to |
| GPL terms may be included as development tools or as part of the system that are "optional" as |
| long as such use does not result in OpenBSD as a whole becoming subject to the GPL terms. |
| As an example, GCC and other GNU tools are included in the OpenBSD tool chain. However, it is |
| quite possible to distribute a system for many applications without a tool chain, or the |
| distributor can choose to include a tool chain as an optional bundle which conforms to the |
| GPL terms. |
| NetBSD* |
| Much of OpenBSD is originally based on and evolved from NetBSD*, since some of the OpenBSD |
| developers were involved in the NetBSD project. The general NetBSD license terms are compatible |
| with the Berkeley license and permit such use. Material subject only to the general NetBSD license |
| can generally be included in OpenBSD. |
| In the past, NetBSD has included material copyrighted by individuals who have imposed license |
| conditions beyond that of the general NetBSD license, but granted the NetBSD Foundation license |
| to distribute the material. Such material can not be included in OpenBSD as long as the conditions |
| imposed are at odds with the OpenBSD license terms or releases from those terms are offered on a |
| discriminatory basis. |
| FreeBSD* |
| Most of FreeBSD* is also based on Berkeley licensed material or includes copyright notices based |
| on the Berkeley model. Such material can be included in OpenBSD, while those parts that are subject |
| to GPL or various individual copyright terms that are at odds with the OpenBSD license can not be |
| included in OpenBSD. |
| Linux* |
| Most of Linux* is subject to GPL style licensing terms and therefore can not be included in |
| OpenBSD. Individual components may be eligible, subject to the terms of the originator's copyright |
| notices. Note that Linux "distributions" may also be subject to additional copyright claims of the |
| distributing organization, either as a compilation or on material included that is not part of the |
| Linux core. |
| X*, XFree86*, X.Org* |
| X*, X.Org* or XFree86* are not parts of OpenBSD, rather X.Org and parts of XFree86 3.3.6 are |
| distributed with many OpenBSD ports as a convenience to the user, subject to applicable license |
| terms. |
| Shareware, Charityware, Freeware, etc. |
| Most "shareware" copyright notices impose conditions for redistribution, use or visibility that |
| are at conflict with the OpenBSD project goals. Review on a case-by-case basis is required as to |
| whether the wording of the conditions is acceptable in terms of conditions being requested vs. |
| demanded and whether the spirit of the conditions is compatible with goals of the OpenBSD project. |
| Public Domain |
| While material that is truly entered into the "Public Domain" can be included in OpenBSD, review |
| is required on a case by case basis. Frequently the "public domain" assertion is made by someone |
| who does not really hold all rights under Copyright law to grant that status or there are a variety |
| of conditions imposed on use. For a work to be truly in the "Public Domain" all rights are abandoned |
| and the material is offered without restrictions. |
| |