I’m removing the BSD advertising clause

Some open source software I wrote decades ago was distributed with the then-current BSD license, which included an advertising clause. This hinders the code’s reuse and distribution, so I’m hereby declaring that the clause’s requirements no longer apply to my code, and that the corresponding clause can be deleted from it.

The code that prompted this change is the Unix stream editor, which I wrote and contributed in the 1980s to Berkeley’s Computer Science Research Group (CSRG). It’s now, among others, part of Apple’s macOS and FreeBSD Unix. Its test suite is also part of the GNU implementation of sed, and therefore part of most Linux distributions. The GNU-distributed test file includes the original four-clause BSD license with the advertising clause. My understanding is that removing this clause will simplify licensing and the lives of people that work on it.

The third (advertising) clause reads as follows.

 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
    must display the following acknowledgement:
      This product includes software developed by the University of
      California, Berkeley and its contributors.

Effective immediately, and following Berkeley’s similar move, licensees and distributors of my code are no longer required to include the acknowledgement within advertising materials. Accordingly, the foregoing paragraph of files containing it is hereby deleted in its entirety.

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