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Comment by Freaky | Hacker News Reader

Why not 2-clause BSD?

Because the second clause is the problem, not the third. The third clause in 3 clause BSD is:

>Neither the name of the <ORGANIZATION> nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

Remove the offending clause and have a two clause BSD license with clauses 1 and 3.

It's a license not an array, you can cut from the middle.

The problem is that "2-clause BSD" is already a generally accepted term for referring to the BSD license with clause 3 removed. Such a license is effectively equivalent to the MIT and ISC licenses, though.

You have a "2 clause BSD" licence. What you call the resultant license is irrelevant. What matters is the text of the license. Heck, you could call it a "modified 3-clause BSD license, please see LICENSE" if that's what you want.

> You have a "2 clause BSD" licence.

Come on, is saving face that important to you? "2-clause BSD" already has a well-accepted meaning. You might as well have said that GPL refers to "Gary's Perfect License"; After all, it's a GPL.

I only commented because of the attitude that removing the second clause from the 3-clause BSD license was not an option because we already have a 2-clause BSD license.

Fair enough. This thread started with "Why not 2-clause BSD", and I understood your comment as defending the use of "2-clause BSD" in a non-standard way.

But nobody suggested it wasn't an option. That is the point.

Two clause BSD is the name of a license. A different license would not be two clause BSD, even if it has two clauses.

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