University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License

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University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License
SPDX identifierNCSA
FSF approved Yes [1]
OSI approved Yes [2]
GPL compatible Yes [1]
Copyleft No [1]
Website otm.illinois.edu/uiuc_openSource   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

The University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License, or UIUC license, is a permissive free software license, based on the MIT/X11 license and the 3-clause BSD license. By combining parts of these two licenses, it attempts to be clearer and more concise than either. [3]

Contents

The license is the result of efforts by a University of Illinois committee set up in 2001. The intention was to create a new license standard for both NCSA and the worldwide software community in general. It was formally certified as an open-source license during a March 28, 2002 board meeting of the Open Source Initiative.

Source code under the NCSA license can be incorporated into proprietary products without the reciprocity requirements that copyleft free software licenses raise. The license is compatible with all versions of the GNU General Public License. [1] Notable software using the license includes LLVM and Clang (version 8.0.1 or earlier [4] ).

Terms

The following is a license template. On an actual license the sections within angle brackets (year, owner organization name, etc.) will be filled out.

Copyright (c) <YEAR> <OWNER ORGANIZATION NAME>.  All rights reserved.  Developed by: <NAME OF DEVELOPMENT GROUP>               <NAME OF INSTITUTION>               <URL FOR DEVELOPMENT GROUP/INSTITUTION>  Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal with the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,   this list of conditions and the following disclaimers. * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,   this list of conditions and the following disclaimers in the documentation   and/or other materials provided with the distribution. * Neither the names of <NAME OF DEVELOPMENT GROUP>, <NAME OF INSTITUTION>,   nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products   derived from this Software without specific prior written permission.  THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE CONTRIBUTORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS WITH THE SOFTWARE.

Comparison to other licenses

The University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License is template-based, like the MIT/X11 and BSD licenses.

The initial license grant is based on text from the MIT license; it clearly states that it applies to the software plus any associated documentation files, and is more specific about what rights are conveyed than the BSD license.

The three license clauses are almost identical to those found in the modified BSD license. It requires that redistributions reproduce the license, and prevents the names of contributors from being used to promote derived products without permission. Here it is more precise than the MIT license, which does not distinguish between redistributions in source code or object form.

The University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License inspired Lawrence Rosen of the Open Source Initiative to create the Academic Free License. The Academic Free License is more complex than the BSD, MIT and NCSA licenses, and covers additional areas such as patent and trademark law.

See also

Related Research Articles

Free software Software licensed to preserve user freedoms

Free software or libre software, infrequently known as freedom-respecting software, is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.

MIT License Permissive free software license

The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license compatibility.

Apache License Free software license developed by the ASF

The Apache License is a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). It allows users to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software under the terms of the license, without concern for royalties. The ASF and its projects release their software products under the Apache License. The license is also used by many non-ASF projects.

The FreeBSD Documentation License is the license that covers most of the documentation for the FreeBSD operating system.

The Academic Free License (AFL) is a permissive free software license written in 2002 by Lawrence E. Rosen, a former general counsel of the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

The Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer (HPND) is an open source license, approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and verified as GPL-compatible by the Free Software Foundation. It is unique among the OSI's licenses because of the choices it allows in its construction; it lets the licensor pick anywhere from 0-2 warranty disclaimers, whether they want to prohibit the author's name from being used in publicity or advertising surrounding a distribution, and other spelling and grammar options. Besides this, the license can be almost functionally identical to the new, 3-clause BSD License, or the MIT License.

A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both source code and object code forms, unless that software was developed by the United States Government, in which case it cannot be copyrighted. Authors of copyrighted software can donate their software to the public domain, in which case it is also not covered by copyright and, as a result, cannot be licensed.

A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, usually including a warranty disclaimer. Examples include the GNU All-permissive License, MIT License, BSD licenses, Apple Public Source License and Apache license. As of 2016, the most popular free-software license is the permissive MIT license.

This comparison only covers software licenses which have a linked Wikipedia article for details and which are approved by at least one of the following expert groups: the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, the Debian Project and the Fedora Project. For a list of licenses not specifically intended for software, see List of free-content licences.

The ISC license is a permissive free software license published by the Internet Software Consortium, now called Internet Systems Consortium (ISC). It is functionally equivalent to the simplified BSD and MIT licenses, but without language deemed unnecessary following the Berne Convention.

WTFPL License for permissive use of intellectual property rights

WTFPL is a permissive free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL. As a public domain like license, the WTFPL is essentially the same as dedication to the public domain. It allows redistribution and modification of the work under any terms. The title is an abbreviation of "Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License".

Public-domain-equivalent license License that waives all copyright and related rights, to the extent permitted by the law in each jurisdiction

Public-domain-equivalent license are licenses that grant public-domain-like rights and/or act as waivers. They are used to make copyrighted works usable by anyone without conditions, while avoiding the complexities of attribution or license compatibility that occur with other licenses.

Free-software license License allowing software modification and redistribution

A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder of a piece of software can remove these restrictions by accompanying the software with a software license which grants the recipient these rights. Software using such a license is free software as conferred by the copyright holder. Free-software licenses are applied to software in source code and also binary object-code form, as the copyright law recognizes both forms.

BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD license was used for its namesake, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system. The original version has since been revised, and its descendants are referred to as modified BSD licenses.

Copyleft Practice of mandating free use in all derivatives of a work

Copyleft is the practice of granting the right to freely distribute and modify intellectual property with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works created from that property. Copyleft in the form of licenses can be used to maintain copyright conditions for works ranging from computer software, to documents, art, scientific discoveries and even certain patents. Copyleft is an arrangement whereby software or artistic work may be used, modified, and distributed freely on condition that anything derived from it is bound by the same conditions.

GNU Free Documentation License Copyleft license primarily for free software documentation

The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Copies may also be sold commercially, but, if produced in larger quantities, the original document or source code must be made available to the work's recipient.

The MirOS Licence is a free content licence originated at The MirOS Project for their own publications because the ISC license used by OpenBSD was perceived as having problems with wording and too America centric. It has strong roots in the UCB BSD licence and the Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer with a focus on modern, explicit, legible language and usability by European, specifically German, authors. It is a permissive (“BSD/MIT-style”) licence.

The zlib license is a permissive free software license which defines the terms under which the zlib software library can be distributed. It is also used by many other free software packages. The libpng library uses a similar license sometimes referred interchangeably as zlib/libpng license.

The Fair License is a short, simple and permissive free software licence which is compatible with the GNU General Public License. Its text is composed of only one sentence and a disclaimer, thus being the shortest license ever approved by the Open Source Initiative. It is also possible to use the Fair License for images, books, music or more generally all kinds of media. The text of the license is as follows:

<Copyright Information>  Usage of the works is permitted provided that this instrument is retained with the works, so that any entity that uses the works is notified of this instrument.  DISCLAIMER: THE WORKS ARE WITHOUT WARRANTY.
Unlicense Public domain-like license with a focus on an anti-copyright message

The Unlicense is a public domain equivalent license with a focus on an anti-copyright message. It was first published on January 1, 2010. The Unlicense offers a public domain waiver text with a fall-back public-domain-like license, inspired by permissive licenses but without an attribution clause. In 2015, GitHub reported that approximately 102,000 of their 5.1 million licensed projects use the Unlicense.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Stallman, Richard. "Various Licenses and Comments about Them". Free Software Foundation. Retrieved 2007-07-08.
  2. ↑ "The University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License (NCSA)". Open Source Initiative. Retrieved 2018-10-03.
  3. ↑ "Illinois Open Source License | UIUC Office of Technology Management". otm.illinois.edu. Archived from the original on 2015-08-19.
  4. ↑ "LICENSE.TXT". llvm.org. Retrieved 2019-09-24.
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