You are right that this generally accepted thinking of complying BSD
license and probably this is the intension of it.
However being advocate of evil we may think of what "reproduce"
copyright message means.
Man pages and --help options are usually created by authors so we could
assume that if there is
no such thing there they agree to this definition.
But we could not exclude that some day authors of network stuff in
Windows which I believe was
borrowed from some BSD OS would require to include they copyright
message in every doc concerning
Windows OS. That is question for lawyers not programmers.
W dniu 31.01.2026 o 11:31, Peter Pentchev pisze:
On Sat, Jan 31, 2026 at 11:15:16AM +0100, Marek Mosiewicz wrote:
Hi,
I believe BSD license is quite misunderstood. In fact it iterates conditions
to use license and there is no option for paying for license if all
conditios are met.
There is however generally not met condition of providing copyright text in
documentation. I believe man should have automate
displaying copyright text when providing documentation for BSD licensed
software. There are other places where copyright should be displayed to.
I think the generally accepted thinking is that having the license in
a file placed in some directory that is clearly marked as documentation
should be sufficient to meet the terms of the license. That is, if
somebody looks for the software license in the program's distributed
documentation, they should be able to find it.
For Debian packages, having the file mentioned in a section of
the /usr/share/doc/<packagename>/copyright file is enough.
G'luck,
Peter
