Copycenter

Copycenter is a term used to explain the nature of the modified BSD license, the free software license used for most of the free software included in various free distributions of the BSD operating system. The term was presented by Kirk McKusick, a computer scientist famous for his work on BSD, during one of his speeches at BSDCon 1999. It is a word play on copyright, copyleft and copy center.

The liberty to 'make as many copies as you want' is provided by most Copyleft licenses. What makes copycenter an appropriate synonym, for the BSD license is that BSD sits in between the Public Domain, which has no protection against derivative proprietarization (similar to BSD), and Copyright, which disallows redistribution and modification without the express consent of the Copyright holder.

See also

*BSD license
*Berkeley Software Distribution
*
*Permissive free software licences

References

*Cite web | year = 2006 | author = The Jargon File contributors | url = http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/copycenter.html | title = copycenter | work = The Jargon File | publisher = Eric S. Raymond | accessmonthday = June 14 | accessyear = 2006