Re: Ancient BSD's Licensing & Trademarks when porting and/or forking V7 and/ or 2.x - 4.x BSD's

["Jeremy C. Reed" <reed%reedmedia.net@localhost>]

On Wed, 10 Feb 2016, Martin wrote:

> Of course that is not what I was trying to suggest. Perhaps I should 
> have made it more clear but I am not trying to void the original 
> licence in any way shape or form. I am asking because I do not want 
> to. Though Lyndon you have answered my question. That a project 
> released under a BSD-style Licence cannot change to a later license 
> version when releasing a derivative of said project. Unlike the GPL 
> licence which if the original work was released under GPL v1 a 
> derivative could be released under GPL v2 or 3.

See 
ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/ucb/4bsd/README.Impt.License.Change

This is an example where the old code could change to the later license.
(And many others who used the similar license later also agreed to 
remove that advertising clause too.)

In your other email you asked about 2.11BSD. The 2BSD series wasn't 
officially maintained by the CSRG. While it includes a lot of software 
from CSRG's 4.3BSD (and later), many of the licenses weren't updated and 
many of the proprietary files weren't replaced with open source files, 
For example, some code refers to the non-open source "Berkeley software 
License Agreement" and many have no license statement at all.

It would be an interesting exercise to compare all 2.11BSD + patch 
release code with the now-open 6th, 32V, and 7th editions to see 
document their lineage and state a license for them. Then do the same of 
the BSD code (for example various code was open sourced in the later 4.3 
Networking releases). (We will make assumption that changes to same code 
files were under the original license and will accept that they are 
under new license today. Even if substantial changes, nobody, I assume, 
will complain today.) There will also be many files unrelated to 32V and 
unrelated to the 4.3BSD family which the lineage will be hard to know.  
That said I personally wouldn't care about it, since many have been 
reusing and redistributing this unofficial project code for decades now. 
(Just so it is clear -- 4.3/4.4 and 2.11 are very different systems and 
4.4 as we know it wasn't derived from original 2BSD -- which wasn't even 
an operating system.)