On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, Bill Pechter wrote:

> NOTE: The copyright of UC Berkeley's Berkeley Software Distribution ("BSD")
> source has been updated.
[...]
> Effective immediately, licensees and distributors are no longer required to
> include the acknowledgement within advertising materials.

Berkeley may have a right to re-release their old 4.4BSD-Lites2 tapes
under a less restrictive license, but anything after that is also
copyrighted by TNF.  As I understaned it, Berkeley cannot ``take away''
our copyright out from under the code we've done.  This came up earlier
when someone said Apache tried to un-GPL code that people had already
contributed to.

Now, if it says, ``Code contributed to Berkeley by ___'' maybe that's
different.  But, the NetBSD code does not all say that.

The actual situation is even more complicated, because NetBSD has BSD-ish
copyrights held by like 50 to 100 different people.  While there may be
some recent positive tendency to get code entered as ``Contains software
contributed to TNF by ...'', until that becomes the case universally, all
those people would have to consent to removing the advertising clause.  
a mess!

My understanding here is, as usual, heavily subject to flaws.  But it's
something one ought to think about before considering that post as
something with grave (if any) implications for _us_.  Likely, you already
realized this, but it seemed unclear to me on my first read.

-- 
Miles Nordin / v:1-888-857-2723 fax:+1 530 579-8680
555 Bryant Street PMB 182 / Palo Alto, CA 94301-1700 / US