FLOSS - New BSD License

There are many times when people don't care if other people make money off their work or not. All they really care about is that they are given credit for their work. This is especially true of students who quite often want their work spread as far as it can so that potential future employers can see their work. This is especially true in the software field. Copyrights prevent the easy spread of ones work, while releasing something to the public domain means that while other people can see your work, they are under no obligation to tell people about the fact that the work is freely available or that you were the person to create the work. They can (and often do) take full credit for the work for themselves.

This is where it would be nice to have a middle ground between copyright and public domain. Guess what? You can already do this. Copyrights allows you to dictate what rights you give a person. You do this by creating a license for your work. The interesting thing is that unless a person has a license to use a copyrighted work, they are not allowed to distribute that work. The creators of copyrighted materials give permission to people by licensing their work to them. Open source licenses work the same as other licenses, but are granted to anybody who wants to agree to the terms of the license. In fact, because copyrights forbid anybody from using the work without the owner's permission, unless the distributor of the copyrighted material agrees to the license being offered to them by the copyright holder, they can not distribute the material.

One of the simplest of the various open source licenses is the BSD license. BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution and was named after the Unix variation that the Berkeley University released. The simplicity of the license helped to make it a fairly popular license among open source developers due to the fact that it is a very short license that gets right to the point.

Copyright (c) ,
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* 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.
* Neither the name of the 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 ``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 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.

Even non-lawyers should have no trouble understanding what that means. The license lets anybody distribute or change the software as long as the source code or documentation contains the license, which means that credit will be retained if the source code is distributed with the software.