On Thu, 22 Feb 2001, Unice, Kyle wrote:

: If one chooses to use NetBSD in a product, does one need to list all the
: contributors to each and any source file in his product brief?
: This seems impractical.  It would seem more logical to have a single line
: "This product include software developed by the NetBSD software team."
: But this may not be legal..  Is there a definitive statement as to what is
: legally required to redistribute NetBSD in terms of copyright and
: acknowledgement?

Where possible, we've had contributors assign their copyrights to TNF (The
NetBSD Foundation) to reduce the number of BSD `advertising clauses' in the
source, reducing as many as possible to only:

 * 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
 *    must display the following acknowledgement:
 *      This product includes software developed by the NetBSD
 *      Foundation, Inc. and its contributors.

and/or the University of California, Berkeley clause that already resides on
a majority of userland source files.

However, you'll still find clauses such as the following sprinkled in the
source code:

 * 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
 *    must display the following acknowledgement:
 *      This product includes software by John Q. Public <jqp@somewhere.com>

We have had to acknowledge all such third party contributors in NetBSD.
They are listed most prominently in the install notes for each platform
(ftp.netbsd.org:/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-<VERSION>/<ARCH>/INSTALL.*).

Whether a "product brief" represents advertising materials, and/or whether a
reference (http URL to a list of acknowledgements, for instance) is legal
for the purposes of "displaying" an acknowledgement, are hairy subjects that
will probably need to be discussed with a real company lawyer.  However, I
feel the effort will be worth it; the legal implications are far less hairy
than, for instance, the GPL.

As a straw example, the Wasabi NetBSD 1.5 CD-ROM distribution liner notes
has an acknowledgement stating:  "This CD-ROM contains software developed by
the University of California, Berkeley, and its contributors; by the NetBSD
Project [sic] and its contributors, and by a large number of contributors,
whose names are listed in the full installation notes on the CD-ROM...."
Whether or not this is proper, legally, we're not entirely certain, but the
acknowledgements are available for viewing on the electronic media.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>  *  Wasabi NetBSD:  Run with it.
-- NetBSD 1.5 now available on CD-ROM  --  http://www.wasabisystems.com/