{"id":"NCSA","title":"University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License","reviewed_on":"2026-09-15","reviewer":"Giray Havur","text_source":"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spdx/license-list-data/main/text/NCSA.txt","text_retrieved":true,"verdict":"created","summary":"The record models the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License, which joins the MIT grant to the three BSD conditions. The permissions are MIT's, including sublicensing, and the duties and the endorsement prohibition are BSD-3-Clause's.","findings":[{"rubric":3,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:permission","description":"The grant reads: \"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the \"Software\"), to deal with the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software\". That is the MIT grant, so the record adds odrl:grantUse and dalicc:sublicense to the permissive core. The grant names sublicensing in as many words, so dalicc:sublicense is a permission, and the clause that lets the recipient of a copy do the same is odrl:grantUse, the term the MIT record already uses for it.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:duty","description":"The conditions are the three BSD conditions: the copyright notice, the list of conditions and the disclaimer must be retained in source redistributions and reproduced in binary redistributions, so cc:Attribution and cc:Notice are duties on distribute, modify and derive.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"The third condition reads: \"Neither the names of <Name of Development Group, Name of Institution>, nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this Software without specific prior written permission.\" That is dalicc:promote as a prohibition. dalicc:ChangeLicense is prohibited because the text requires the license itself to travel with every copy, which is the reading IscLicense and BSD-3-Clause take of the same clause. The MIT record does not carry the prohibition although its text has the same requirement, so the library is not uniform here. (Corrected on 2026-09-15 by the verification pass: see the rubric 3 finding on relicensing below.)","action":"applied"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"minor","field":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer","description":"The disclaimer is the MIT disclaimer with the contributors added; it is split into the warranty sentence and the liability sentence.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":7,"severity":"info","field":"cc:jurisdiction","description":"The text names no legal system and no term, so cc:jurisdiction is dalicc:worldwide and dalicc:validityType is dalicc:perpetual.","action":"none"},{"rubric":2,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:target","description":"One odrl:AssetCollection of dct:type dcmitype:Software, following BSD-3-Clause. The text licenses software and associated documentation.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":9,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The consistency check with the axioms of dg_default returned no conflicts.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The record differs from BSD-3-Clause only in the two permissions that come with the MIT grant, odrl:grantUse and dalicc:sublicense. Everything else is BSD-3-Clause.","action":"none"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:permission","description":"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: \"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the \"Software\"), to deal with the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software ... subject to the following conditions: Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice.\" The permission carries the dalicc:compliantLicense duty, as Apache-2.0 does, because the notice has to survive the relicensing.","action":"applied"}],"family":"Permissive: MIT, ISC and BSD-like","port_of":null,"variant_kind":null,"notes":"Modelled from the SPDX plain text. The text names placeholders rather than a steward, so there is no dct:publisher; cc:legalcode is the technology management page of the University of Illinois that SPDX lists first."}