Understanding the BSD license

Business
1

Hello all -

I have a developer who has proposed using a Javascript library that was written at MIT and released under the BSD 2-clause license. I haven’t used anything under this license before so I was doing some reading about how it works - very short and simple!

Copyright <year> <copyright holder>. All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

   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.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY <COPYRIGHT HOLDER> ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL <COPYRIGHT HOLDER> OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

The views and conclusions contained in the software and documentation are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing official policies, either expressed or implied, of <copyright holder>.

This license seemed easy enough to understand so I figured I wouldn’t consult my attorney. We intend to create a website the provides a commercial service to the public using this code. We won’t be distributing or selling the code other than by allowing paid users of our website to utilize the code as part of our front end. We’ll leave any required notices in the codebase.

It seems to me that we would be compliant. Anyone care to play attorney with me and throw out an opinion?

thanks, Dave

2

I am not a lawyer so take whatever I say with a pinch of salt but I am pretty sure about how BSD works.

Actually, if you never intend to give away your code then you don’t need to care if it’s MIT, BSD, Apache or the more restrictive GPL. Likewise, it doesn’t matter if you are using it for commercial website or, say, a charity.

Anything released under BSD is ‘almost’ equivalent to work that has entered public domain. The only requirement perhaps is that you must keep the original copyright notice intact in the source code. But even that applies only when you are redistributing your code (giving it away to someone else). On your own server, you can even strip that copyright notice (can’t tell you why you would want to do it though).

3

That is also my interpretation, yes. We certainly intend to provide a commercial service using their codebase, but we’ll leave in the copyright so it seems to be just fine.