OpenBSD Copyright Policy
https://www.openbsd.org/policy.html
Goal
Copyright law is complex, OpenBSD policy is simple — OpenBSD
strives to provide code that can be freely used, copied, modified,
and distributed by anyone and for any purpose. This maintains the
spirit of the original Berkeley Software Distribution. The
preferred wording of a license to be applied to new code can be
found in the license template.
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 Unix source distribution
un-encumbered by proprietary code and commercial licensing.
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 original 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. 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.
Compilation
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.
By international law, specifically the Berne Convention for the
Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, part of the author's
copyright, the so-called moral rights, are inalienable. This
includes the author's right "to claim authorship of the work and
to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of,
or other derogatory action in relation to, the said work, which
would be prejudicial to his honor or reputation". In some
countries, the law reserves additional inalienable moral rights to
the author. On the other hand, the author is free to transfer
other parts of his copyright, the so-called economic rights, in
particular the rights to use, copy, modify, distribute, and
license the work.
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.
Note that a license is not to be confused with a copyright
transfer. While a transfer would give the new copyright holder
exclusive rights to use the code and take these rights away from
the author, a license typically grants additional people
non-exclusive rights to use the code, while the authors retain all
their rights.
The above observations regarding moral rights imply that putting
code under an ISC or two-clause BSD license essentially makes the
code as free as it can possibly get. Modifying the wording of
these licenses can only result in one of the three following
effects:
* making the code less free by adding additional restrictions
regarding its use, copying, modification or distribution;
* or effectively not changing anything by merely changing the
wording, but not changing anything substantial regarding the
legal content;
* or making the license illegal by attempting to deprive the
authors of rights they cannot legally give away.
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
The original Unix code (AT&T versions 1 through 7 UNIX,
including 32V) was freed by Caldera, Inc. on 23 January
2002 and is now available under a 4-term BSD-style
license. As a result, it would theoretically be possible
to incorporate original Unix code into OpenBSD. However,
that code is now so old that it does not satisfy today's
interface and quality standards.
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 license was similar to the Berkeley
license, but source code published under version 2 of the
Apache license is subject to additional restrictions and
cannot be included into OpenBSD. In particular, if you use
code under the Apache 2 license, some of your rights will
terminate if you claim in court that the code violates a
patent.
A license can only be considered fully permissive if it
allows use by anyone for all the future without giving up
any of their rights. If there are conditions that might
terminate any rights in the future, or if you have to give
up a right that you would otherwise have, even if
exercising that right could reasonably be regarded as
morally objectionable, the code is not free.
In addition, the clause about the patent license is
problematic because a patent license cannot be granted
under Copyright law, but only under contract law, which
drags the whole license into the domain of contract law.
But while Copyright law is somewhat standardized by
international agreements, contract law differs wildly
among jurisdictions. So what the license means in
different jurisdictions may vary and is hard to predict.
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 available in the file
/usr/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 superficially look like a noble strategy,
it is a condition that is typically unacceptable for
commercial use of software. So in practice, it usually
ends up hindering free sharing and reuse of code and ideas
rather than encouraging it. As a consequence, no
additional software bound by the GPL terms will be
considered for inclusion into the OpenBSD base system.
For historical reasons, the OpenBSD base system still
includes the following GPL-licensed components: the GNU
compiler collection (GCC) with supporting binutils and
libraries, GNU CVS, GNU texinfo, the mkhybrid file system
creation tool, and the readline library. Replacement by
equivalent, more freely licensed tools is a long-term
desideratum.
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.Org
The X.Org Foundation maintains and distributes the X
Window System under a modified MIT license, which is quite
similar to the BSD license and additionally allows
sublicensing. Under the name of Xenocara, the OpenBSD base
system includes an improved and actively maintained
version of the X.Org code.
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.
In some jurisdictions, it is doubtful whether voluntarily
placing one's own work into the public domain is legally
possible. For that reason, to make any substantial body of
code free, it is preferable to state the copyright and put
it under an ISC or BSD license instead of attempting to
release it into the public domain.