The New and simplified BSD License is the oldest OpenSource license.
OSI compliance
The original version of the BSD license (the so called four clause BSD license) was not a true OSS license as it included two contradicting claims. It required all advertizing material for software that uses code under BSD license to mention that te project containes software developed at the University of California, Berkeley but at the same time disallowed to use the University of California, Berkeley for advertizing without prior written permission. This has been corrected by the by the Director of the Office of Technology Licensing of the University of California on July 22nd, 1999. The New and simplified BSD License is a fully OSI compliant license.
License type
The BSD license is an academical license.
Patents
The BSD license neither gives patent grants nor does it contain rules that help to defend against patent trolls. This causes a risk to the users of BSD licensed code in case that the author of the code is holding patents on technologies used by his code.
The BSD license in collaborative works
The BSD license allows code flow from and to BSD licensed projects into projects under a different license. Any fraction of BSD licensed code may be incorporated into any other work.
For this reason, the BSD license is one of the licenses recommended by the OSSCC for new projects in case that the author of the code does not own patents on the code.
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