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 way it was characterized politically, you had copyright, which is what the big companies use to lock everything up; you had copyleft, which is free software's way of making sure they can't lock it up; and then Berkeley had what we called ‘copycenter’, which is ‘take it down to the copy center and make as many copies as you want.’ | „ |
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—Kirk McKusick, BSDCon 1999 |
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The liberty to 'make as many copies as you want' is in fact provided by most Copyleft licenses. What makes copycenter an appropriate synonym for the BSD license, is that it does not impose any restrictions on how you license other works that you distribute or combine with it.
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