Author | Internet Systems Consortium |
---|---|
DFSG compatible | Yes |
FSF approved | Yes |
OSI approved | Yes |
GPL compatible | Yes |
Copyleft | No |
Linking from code with a different license | Yes |
The ISC license is a permissive free software license written by the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC). It is meant to be functionally equivalent to the simplified BSD and the MIT licenses, differing in its removal of language deemed unnecessary following the global adoption of the Berne Convention. Initially used for ISC's own software releases, it has since become the preferred license of projects such as OpenBSD and Node.js's npm.
A template of this license is:
Before accepting the license as a free software license, the Free Software Foundation asked for clarification of the text. In July 2007, as a result, "and distribute" was changed to "and/or distribute". The Free Software Foundation eventually approved the ISC license as a lax, permissive free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL. As of May 2016[update], The OpenBSD template still uses the original "and distribute" phrasing, due to concerns about the modified version.