[En-Nut-Discussion] Copyright Statement

[Harald Kipp]

I had been just asked by a company about the advertising clause
in the BSD style license, Nut/OS comes with. As this might be
of general interest, I'll post part of my reply here.

Starting with Nut/OS version 3 we will change the copyright clause:

  * 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
  *    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
  * 2. 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.
  * 3. Neither the name of the copyright holders nor the names of
  *    contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived
  *    from this software without specific prior written permission.

This is similar to the current BSD licence. They also removed
the advertising clause and I agree that this often is inacceptable.

As the main copyright holder of this software I officially permit you
and others to replace the the three clauses of the copyright statement
in the current and previous releases with the three clauses given
above.

So it's OK, if you put the disclaimer in any (not every :-)) material
delivered with you product.

Also note, that parts are copyright

by Digital Equipment Corporation (good old days), who included
a simple statement,
The Regents of the University of California, who permit to use the
new BSD licence given above

and last not least

David J. Hudson, whom I asked recently to make a conversion to BSD
too. Unfortunately he is bound to Ubicom now and not able to change
that copyright anymore. Anyway, there's no problem with his GPL,
because he made a special exception:

-----------
  * Whilst the GNU General Public License is generally suitable for most
  * operating system applications within a workstation or server environment,
  * it presents certain obstacles that prevent its wide acceptance within
  * many embedded application fields. In particular the requirements that
  * prevent the linking of software licensed under the GPL with software
  * that is not licensed under the GPL present a serious problem to many
  * would-be users who for various reasons are unable to comply with this.
  *
  * With this in mind, Liquorice is released with the a special exception
  * to the GNU Public License that permits some additional uses of the
  * software.
  *
  * Special Exception
  *
  * If you choose to link software from Liquorice with other files to
  * produce an executable, this does not by itself cause the resulting
  * executable to be covered by the GNU General Public License. Your use
  * of the executable is in no way restricted on account of linking the
  * Liquorice code with it.
  *
  * This exception does not however invalidate any other reason why the
  * executable file might be covered by the GNU General Public License.
  *
  * This exception applies only to the code released by David J. Hudson
  * and any other identified copyright holder under the name Liquorice.
  * If you copy other code that is released by its copyright holder under
  * the GNU General Public License into a copy of Liquorice, as the GNU
  * General Public License permits, then this exception does not apply to
  * the code that you add in this way. To avoid misleading anyone as to
  * the status of such modified files, you must delete references to this
  * exception notice from them.
  *
  * If you write modifications of your own for Liquorice, it is your
  * choice whether to permit this exception to apply to your modifications.
  * If you do not wish this, delete references to this exception notice
  * from the affected files.
-----------

There's no other GPL code included in Nut/OS.

Harald