Why does the open source license BSD-Clause 2/3 not have something like &quot;to deal in the Software without restriction? Every article that I've read about BSD-Clause 2 and 3 pretty much said that the licensed software is free of restrictions/any purpose as long as you follow what the licenses say, but the actual license says mostly about permitting any kind of redistribution as long as you follow the guidelines, but there are no mentions of any purpose/free of restrictions. The 0 Clause BSD actually mentions &quot;for any purpose&quot;. Are licenses not required to explicitly state &quot;for any purpose/without restrictions&quot; and people can just do what they want with the licensed software and follow explicit guidelines in the license as long as the license itself doesn't explicitly state that those certain activities are prohibited (like commercial use)? For example, I saw licenses like MIT or GNU explicitly state things like &quot;without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software&quot; and &quot;freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish)&quot; but BSD Clause 2-3 doesn't. How come? I know that the BSD license is listed on the open source initiative which has it in the definitions that the license cannot restrict any party from selling the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution. Since BSD is listed there, it should be following those rules so therefore commercial use would be fine, but why does clause 2 + 3 have that zero clause statement removed? Is it unnecessary to repeat it, because the website already has it in the definition?
Are licenses not required to explicitly state Nah, not at all. Licenses state whatever they want. There is no authority to compel license writers to include any particular statements. In case a license you wanna use does not make sense, you either seek clarification or do not use it.
If you want to implement this or a similar feature, you'd look up the patents, and either get a license (unlikely that Microsoft would give you a license), or figure out how to implement the feature without violating the patent. An example how a company I worked for worked around a patent: In order to compress data. in the best possible way, the idea was to try eight different methods to compress the data and pick the best compressed data. There was a patent for that (even though to me, this was quite obvious). Workaround: The software tried eight different methods and reported a number from 1 to 8 indicating which method gave the best result (unlike the patent, which actually gave the best result). Then the data was compressed once using the best method. No patent violation. You'd probably want a patent lawyer to check if your idea how to implement the feature violates the patent or not, and how to get around it. It takes a specific mindset that you and I don't have. And even good lawyers who are not patent lawyers might not be able to help you there. Commercial vs. open source/free software makes no difference, except that Microsoft might not bother suing you if there is no money to be made. Unless the intent is to prevent you from implementing the feature, in which case the would sue companies without money as well.
could this mean my employer owns the idea and anything I develop --since I would use the same technology for my idea that I do at work? No, unless by &quot;technology&quot; you mean the employer's materials or resources (see condition 3 of the clause). Your remark that &quot;this is completely and utterly unrelated to [employer's] business model&quot; survives items 1 and 2. Likewise, working on your idea outside hours survives the corresponding part of item 3. Would this also mean that any open-source software I develop outside of work automatically belongs to my employer? No, unless the software you develop is &quot;based on [your] knowledge [etc.] of (COMPANY)&quot;.
Using this answer on Open Source Stack Exchange, If a repository has no license, then all rights are reserved and it is not Open Source or Free. You cannot modify or redistribute this code without explicit permission from the copyright holder. If a project doesn't have a licence, then normal copyright rules apply - this means that the author reserves all rights. The way a project is obtained, nor (except in exceptional cases), does not alter the ownership of copyright of a project. Bob will always hold copyright, unless he releases a legal document, such as a licence, that grants others various rights to the project.
A licence is your permission for others to use the work within the specific terms of the licence. You never license yourself, you license someone else or someone else license you. If you are the sole right holder of a work and you do not assign or transfer your copyright interests to others, you retain all rights regarding the work. Licensing your work under a CC licence does not make it impossible for yourself to use it commercially in the past, present or future. Of course, permissive licences like CC-BY might decrease the commercial value of your work since anyone else could reuse your work freely with minimum restrictions. But that does not prevent you legally from use your own work for commercial purposes. The exact choice depends on your wish on other aspects of using your work. For example, CC-BY-NC would require the licensee (essentially, anyone else not having another overriding agreement with you) to attribute/give you credits in order to use it non-commercially only, but they may remix and adapt your work as they wish as long as they credit you and the purpose is non commericial. You may also add an ShareAlike (SA) requirement where if the licensee creates an derivative work based on your work, they must license their derivative work using CC-BY-NC-SA as well. The last kind, CC-BY-NC-ND (NoDerivatives), would not only require credit when the licensee uses your work, but also prevent them from creating derivative works from your work.
Yep, you are. You still need to keep the LICENSE and NOTICE files in the repository, if there were any in your copy of the project. These files contain the terms and conditions for the project, and provide attribution to the original developers. If you're trying to attribute in the UI of your application, you probably should. It's considered courteous and in the spirit of open source as well. This is also related: Do I need to include the full text of the MIT license in the UI of my app?
A prohibition on "translating the code to the other programming languages" is a prohibition on creating a particular type of derivative work. The right to create any derivative work is an exclusive right of the copyright owner. 17 USC 106(2) They can licence or give that right to you in part, and with limitations. You are limited from taking what would amount to a "substantial similarity" compared to the copyrightable elements of the original. For computer programs, US courts use the abstraction-filtration-comparison test.
Choice 2 is what the writers of the license have in mind. You own the physical media on which the copy is delivered, such as a DVD or floppy disk (if there was physical media). But you do not own the copy of the software, you merely have purchased a license to use it, which may be revocable under specified circumstances. This is different from the law in the case of a book. Why you buy a book, you own a copy of the book, although you do not own the copyright to the book, and may not make additional copies. The license model was adopted by commercial software distributors for several reasons, but largely to avoid the "first sale doctrine". When you buy a copy of a copyrighted work, you have the right (under US law at least) to lend, rent, sell, or give-away that copy. You do not need the permission of the copyright holder to do any of these. Those in the commercial software business did not want customers to be able to do those things legally. By making the software subject to a license, which is a contract, they could write that license to restrict or prohibit those rights. Sellers also wanted to prohibit reverse engineering of the software, and to restrict use of the software. (For example, to limit the user to installing it on a single computer.) There was at first much dispute over the enforcability of such license agreements. But most US courts now accept them as valid and enforceable, and copyright law has been modified to take account of them. Specifically, 17 USC 109 (2)(b)(1)(A) seems to include a legislative acceptance of this rule.