Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer

Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer
AuthorBruce A. Dodson[1]
PublisherBruce A. Dodson
Published9 November 2002
SPDX identifierHPND
FSF approvedYes[2]
OSI approvedYes
GPL compatibleYes[2]
CopyleftNo[2]
Linking from code with a different licenceYes
Websitehttps://opensource.org/licenses/HPND at the Wayback Machine (archived January 29, 2023)
DeprecatedYes[3]

The Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer (HPND)[3] is an open source license, approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and verified as GPL-compatible by the Free Software Foundation.[2] It is unique among the OSI's licenses because of the choices it allows in its construction; it lets the licensor pick anywhere from 0-2 warranty disclaimers, whether they want to prohibit the author's name from being used in publicity or advertising surrounding a distribution (like in the BSD License), and other spelling and grammar options. Besides this, the license can be almost functionally identical to the new, 3-clause BSD License (if the option for the no-promotion clause is exercised), or the MIT License (if the option for the no-promotion clause is not exercised).

Variants of this license are in use primarily in older software, including the original BSD kernel. Today,[when?] it is most popular to choose either the new 3-clause BSD License or the MIT License to meet the licensing needs of the developer.

This is the only OSI-certified license (excluding the public domain) that can lack a disclaimer of warranty.

The license was deprecated by its author, Bruce A. Dodson, prior to 24 September 2009.[4]

  1. ^ Dodson, Bruce (29 November 2002). "discuss: approval request: "Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer"". license-discuss (Mailing list). Archived from the original on 7 March 2016.
  2. ^ a b c d "Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer". Various Licenses and Comments about Them. Free Software Foundation. Retrieved 29 May 2015.
  3. ^ a b "Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer (HPND):Licensing". Open Source Initiative OSI. 2011-06-05. Archived from the original on 2011-06-05. Retrieved 2023-08-10.
  4. ^ "Legacy approval request". BSD license (PostgreSQL variant). 2009-09-24. Retrieved 2023-08-10.