BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent License

Also known as BSD+Patent, BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent License, BSD-2-Clause-Patent, BSDplusPatent.

Commercial use: allowed
Share alike: not required
Attribution: required (keep the copyright and license notices)

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Write this as a license text (needs an account) DALICC reads the model above and writes what it permits, requires and prohibits in plain English. Without an account, the Text download above writes the model out from the vocabulary.

Canonical URI https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/BSD-2-Clause-Patent

Permissions

Change license by library convention
Duties
- Use a compliant license by library convention
Charge distribution fee from the text
Commercial use from the text
Derivative works from the text
Derive from the text
Duties
- Attribution from the text
- Notice from the text
Display from the text
Distribute from the text
Duties
- Attribution from the text
- Notice from the text
Modified works from the text
Modify from the text
Duties
- Attribution from the text
- Notice from the text
Patent grant from the text
Present from the text
Reproduce from the text

Prohibitions

This license states no prohibitions.

License-wide duties

This license states no duties that apply to the work as a whole.

What applies by default

The statements above are the library's reading of this license: each is marked with the sentence it rests on, or as a library convention where the text is not explicit. The statements below are the ones the DALICC reasoner supplies for acts the license says nothing about, from the default rules of the dependency graph it reasons with. Each one names the legal source it rests on. None of it is in the record.

Promote by default rule (adopted)

This license says nothing about Promote, and the graph applies this reading in all jurisdictions it covers: it is not permitted unless the license permits it.

A licence that says nothing about endorsement is read as not allowing it: the licence gives the licensee no right to use the licensor's name or marks in a way that states or implies that the licensor endorses the licensee or its product, while stating truthfully that a work is based on or uses the licensed work is a different act that this rule does not decide. A copyright licence grants rights in the work, and the right to use a name or a trademark is a separate right under trademark law and the protection of names, which a silent copyright licence does not pass on. Combining a licence that is silent about endorsement with one that permits it shows a conflict marked as coming from this rule.

Basis Trademark and name rights are separate from copyright: Regulation (EU) 2017/1001 article 9 lets the proprietor of an EU trade mark prevent all third parties not having his consent from using the sign in the course of trade, and Directive (EU) 2015/2436 article 10, 15 U.S.C. 1114 and 1125(a), section 12 BGB and section 43 ABGB protect marks and names in the same way. The library's evidence is Creative Commons 4.0 section 2(b)(2): Patent and trademark rights are not licensed under this Public License. A copyright licence that is silent grants no right to use the licensor's name or marks to suggest endorsement (Worldwide)

Clauses

Warranty disclaimer

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED.

Limitation of liability

IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Additional clauses

Subject to the terms and conditions of this license, each copyright holder and contributor hereby grants to those receiving rights under this license a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except for failure to satisfy the conditions of this license) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer this software, where such license applies only to those patent claims, already acquired or hereafter acquired, licensable by such copyright holder or contributor that are necessarily infringed by: (a) their Contribution(s) (the licensed copyrights of copyright holders and non-copyrightable additions of contributors, in source or binary form) alone; or (b) combination of their Contribution(s) with the work of authorship to which such Contribution(s) was added by such copyright holder or contributor, if, at the time the Contribution is added, such addition causes such combination to be necessarily infringed. The patent license shall not apply to any other combinations which include the Contribution. Except as expressly stated above, no rights or licenses from any copyright holder or contributor is granted under this license, whether expressly, by implication, estoppel or otherwise.

Info

Target asset types: Software
Region / jurisdiction: Worldwide
Validity: Perpetual
Source: https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause-Patent.html
Legal code: https://opensource.org/license/BSD-2-Clause-Patent
This description is published under: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
SPDX identifier: BSD-2-Clause-Patent on the SPDX license list
DALICC identifier: BSD-2-Clause-Patent

This record is published under CC BY 4.0. Credit it as: DALICC License Library, DALICC - Verein zur Förderung der Rechtssicherheit in der Datenbewirtschaftung, https://dalicc.net, CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The license it describes belongs to its publisher.

Use this license

Everything below is generated from this record. Replace the example address with the address of your own work.

JSON sidecar

{
  "license-uri": "https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/BSD-2-Clause-Patent",
  "license-title": "BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent License",
  "spdx-id": "BSD-2-Clause-Patent",
  "attribution": "Copyright (c) [year] [copyright holder]",
  "asset": null,
  "generated-by": "DALICC"
}

RDF, Turtle

@prefix cc: <http://creativecommons.org/ns#> .

<https://example.org/my-work>
    cc:license <https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/BSD-2-Clause-Patent> .

RDF, JSON-LD

{
  "@context": {
    "cc": "http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
  },
  "@id": "https://example.org/my-work",
  "cc:license": {
    "@id": "https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/BSD-2-Clause-Patent"
  }
}

HTML attribution

<p>This work is licensed under <a href="https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/BSD-2-Clause-Patent" rel="license">BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent License</a>.</p>

This license asks for attribution, so the credit line is part of it.

Badge

Markdown

[![License: BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent License](https://dalicc.net/license-library/BSD-2-Clause-Patent/badge.svg)](https://dalicc.net/license-library/BSD-2-Clause-Patent)

HTML

<a href="https://dalicc.net/license-library/BSD-2-Clause-Patent"><img src="https://dalicc.net/license-library/BSD-2-Clause-Patent/badge.svg" alt="License: BSD-2-Clause Plus Patent License"></a>

Review

Written from the license text by: Giray Havur
Written on: 2026-09-15
Second review: not yet done
Record changed since this review: yes (version 2, 2026-09-24)
Findings: 8 recorded, 6 applied to the record, 0 proposed

Models the two-clause BSD licence with the express patent licence added for the OpenIB and EDK II projects. The copyright side is modelled exactly as BSD-2-Clause; the patent side adds a dalicc:patentGrant permission and the quoted scope limits. Nothing here is legal advice.

8 findings

major Rubric 3 odrl:permission applied

Beyond the two-clause BSD grant the text adds "each copyright holder and contributor hereby grants to those receiving rights under this license a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except for failure to satisfy the conditions of this license) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer this software". That is an express patent licence, so dalicc:patentGrant is a permission.
minor Rubric 4 odrl:prohibition applied

The text has no endorsement clause and no defensive-termination clause, so neither dalicc:promote nor dalicc:patentRetaliationTermination is stated. The review group notes anticipated a retaliation sentence; the SPDX text carries none, only the parenthesis "(except for failure to satisfy the conditions of this license)" inside the patent grant. dalicc:ChangeLicense is prohibited as in the rest of the family. (Corrected on 2026-09-15 by the verification pass: see the rubric 3 finding on relicensing below.)
major Rubric 5 odrl:duty applied

The retention conditions are the whole content of the licence. cc:Attribution and cc:Notice hang off odrl:distribute, odrl:modify and odrl:derive, because the text requires the copyright notice, the list of conditions and the disclaimer to travel with every redistributed and every modified copy.
minor Rubric 6 dalicc:additionalClauses applied

The whole patent paragraph, its two scope limbs (a) and (b) and the closing sentence "Except as expressly stated above, no rights or licenses from any copyright holder or contributor is granted under this license, whether expressly, by implication, estoppel or otherwise" are quoted verbatim, because the scope of a patent grant cannot be expressed by the dalicc:patentGrant action alone. The warranty and liability sentences are split as elsewhere in this review group.
info Rubric 7 cc:jurisdiction applied

The text names no legal system and sets no term, so cc:jurisdiction is dalicc:worldwide and dalicc:validityType is dalicc:perpetual.
info Rubric 9 record none

The consistency check of app.services.composer with the dependency graph dg_default returned an empty conflict list.
info Rubric 10 record none

Follows licensedata/licenses/BSD-2-Clause.ttl for the copyright grant and the duties, and is the first BSD record in the library to carry dalicc:patentGrant.
major Rubric 3 odrl:permission applied

Library convention 15: a licence that asks for no reciprocity and no source code asks only that the notice travels with the copy, which is a duty on the acts it governs and not a bar on putting the copy under other terms. dalicc:ChangeLicense is therefore a permission here, and the prohibition the earlier reading wrote is removed. The text reads: "Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer." The permission carries the dalicc:compliantLicense duty, as Apache-2.0 does, because the notice has to survive the relicensing.

Report an issue The review record as JSON The review checks the model against the license text. It is not legal advice.

History

This license model has 2 versions. Version 2 is the one served today; every earlier version keeps its own address, so a conclusion drawn from one of them can still be checked against it.

Version 2 current2026-09-24 Giray Havur

The changes since version 1 recorded which sentence of the text each statement rests on and named the license the record itself is published under.

View version 2 JSON-LD Turtle RDF/XML
3 changes
- changed permission dalicc:ChangeLicense with duties [dalicc:compliantLicense]
  
  was permission dalicc:ChangeLicense with duties [dalicc:compliantLicense]
  
  Manual edit The statement is marked as a library convention, family rule 15: Permissive records permit relicensing: the text does not state it in as many words. Its duty dalicc:compliantLicense is marked as a library convention, family rule 15: Permissive records permit relicensing.
- changed permission dalicc:patentGrant
  
  was permission dalicc:patentGrant
  
  Manual edit The statement now quotes the sentence of the licence text it rests on: "Subject to the terms and conditions of this license, each copyright holder and contributor hereby grants to those receiving rights under this license a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except for failure to satisfy the conditions of this license) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer this software, where such license applies only to those patent claims, already acquired or hereafter acquired, licensable by such copyright holder or contributor that are necessarily infringed by:"
- added dct:license <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>
  
  Manual edit Every record is published under CC BY 4.0. cc:license names the record DALICC keeps of that licence; dct:license now names it by the address Creative Commons publishes it at, so that a consumer matching the canonical IRI finds it.
Version 1

Created from the license text on 2026-09-15 (BSD variants).

View version 1 JSON-LD Turtle RDF/XML

Every change names the reason behind it: a finding of the content review, one of its library-wide decisions, the metadata that review wrote onto every record, or a hand edit. None of it is legal advice.

Nothing on this page is legal advice. What a license means is decided by its text; ask a legal advisor before you rely on it.