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| New BSD License | |
|---|---|
| Name | New BSD License |
| Other names | BSD 3-Clause License, Modified BSD License |
| Type | Free and open-source software license |
| Date | 1999 |
| Derived from | BSD License |
New BSD License The New BSD License is a permissive software license originating from the University of California, Berkeley Berkeley Software Distribution lineage and later formalized in community practice. It provides minimal restrictions on redistribution and use, permitting both proprietary software integration and academic distribution, and has been instrumental in projects associated with institutions like DARPA, MIT, and companies such as Apple Inc. and Microsoft.
The license evolved from the original Berkeley Software Distribution terms maintained by contributors at the University of California, Berkeley and influenced by legal practice at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and U.S. Department of Energy. After the cleanup of advertising clauses in the late 1990s, the license was adopted by projects affiliated with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD communities and was circulated among corporate entities including Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Oracle Corporation. Its sanitization paralleled discussions in settings like the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation debates over permissive versus copyleft approaches, with legal analysis by scholars at Stanford Law School and Harvard Law School.
Canonical wording used in many projects was adapted by contributors associated with BSD daemons projects and codified in templates used by organizations such as The Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, and Linux Foundation projects. Variants emerged to address attribution lines for institutions like NASA, European Space Agency, and corporate legal departments at Google LLC and Facebook, Inc.. Some variants include additional patent clauses influenced by litigation histories involving Microsoft and Novell, while others were simplified for use by educational projects at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology.
The license permits redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, under minimal obligations typically limited to retention of copyright notices and disclaimers. Its obligations are enforced in contexts including contributions to repositories hosted on GitHub, GitLab, and SourceForge, and govern interactions between contributors from organizations like Red Hat, Canonical Ltd., and SUSE. The permissive terms facilitate incorporation into products from corporations such as Intel Corporation and Qualcomm, and into academic codebases at Carnegie Mellon University and University of Cambridge research groups.
Because of its permissive nature, the license is generally compatible with many free software and open-source licenses including the GNU Lesser General Public License, and projects using it have been merged into ecosystems governed by the Apache License 2.0, MIT License, and various Creative Commons workflows. Compatibility discussions have featured stakeholders from Free Software Foundation Europe, legal teams from Red Hat, and counsel for projects like KDE and GNOME. Tensions have arisen in interactions with the GNU General Public License community over combined distributions, with precedent appearing in corporate compliance programs at Black Duck Software and advisory work by OSI.
The license is used by foundational projects such as FreeBSD, OpenStack, and PostgreSQL-adjacent modules, and adopted by corporations including Apple Inc. for components in macOS and by Microsoft for selected libraries. Academic and research institutions like MIT, Princeton University, and ETH Zurich have released code under the license, while standards bodies and consortia like IETF, W3C, and IEEE have seen related permissive-text releases. Prominent software projects and libraries employing the license include work from Redis Labs, Nmap Project, SQLite Consortium derivatives, and contributions integrated into distributions like Debian and Ubuntu.
Critiques focus on the license’s permissiveness enabling proprietary re-releases without reciprocal source distribution, a concern voiced by advocates at the Free Software Foundation and debated in forums involving EFF and academics at Yale Law School and Columbia Law School. Corporate controversies have arisen when code under the license was incorporated into closed-source products by firms such as Cisco Systems and Oracle Corporation, prompting debate in communities like Stack Overflow and legal analysis disseminated by Harvard Business Review contributors. Patent-related disputes and compatibility issues have been highlighted in litigation and advisory cases involving Microsoft and Novell, and by compliance incidents managed by consultants from OpenLogic and Palamida.