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Williams, Sam

"Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software"

The contract terms
were liberal. All a licensee had to do was give credit
to the university in advertisements touting derivative programs.The University
of California's "obnoxious advertising
clause" would later prove to be a problem. Looking for
a less restrictive alternative to the GPL, some hackers
used the University of California, replacing
"University of California" with the name of their own
instution. The result: free software programs that
borrowed from dozens of other programs would have to
cite dozens of institutions in advertisements. In 1999,
after a decade of lobbying on Stallman's part, the
University of California agreed to drop this clause.
In contrast to the GPL, proprietary offshoots were
permissible. Only one problem hampered the license's
rapid adoption: the BSD Networking release wasn't a
complete operating system. People could study the code,
but it could only be run in conjunction with other
proprietary-licensed code.
Over the next few years, Bostic and other University of
California employees worked to replace the missing
components and turn BSD into a complete, freely
redistributable operating system.


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