{"id":"Sleepycat","title":"Sleepycat License","reviewed_on":"2026-09-15","reviewer":"Giray Havur","text_source":"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spdx/license-list-data/main/text/Sleepycat.txt","text_retrieved":true,"verdict":"created","summary":"The record models the Sleepycat License, the Berkeley DB license. It is BSD-3-Clause with a fourth condition that makes it reciprocal in substance: any redistribution, in any form, must be accompanied by information on how to obtain the complete source code of the DB software and of any software that uses it. That condition is modelled as a cc:SourceCode duty on distribute, modify and derive and quoted in dalicc:additionalClauses.","findings":[{"rubric":3,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:permission","description":"\"Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met\". The permissive core, as on BSD-3-Clause.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:duty","description":"The third condition reads: \"Redistributions in any form must be accompanied by information on how to obtain complete source code for the DB software and any accompanying software that uses the DB software.\" cc:SourceCode is therefore a duty on distribute, modify and derive, alongside cc:Attribution and cc:Notice from the first two conditions.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:duty","description":"No cc:ShareAlike duty is written, although this license is often called copyleft. The condition requires the source of the work and of software that uses it to be obtainable and freely redistributable under reasonable conditions; it does not require the whole work to be licensed under these terms, which is what cc:ShareAlike says in this library. The reciprocity a reader should know about is in the quoted clause.","action":"none"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"The second and third blocks of the text carry the endorsement clause: \"Neither the name of the University 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.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"minor","field":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer","description":"The text repeats three BSD blocks, one for Sleepycat Software, one for the Regents of the University of California and one for Harvard. The quoted warranty and liability clauses are the Sleepycat block, which is the operative one; the two backticks and two apostrophes around AS IS are the typography of the published text and are kept.","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 a database library. dcmitype:Dataset is not written: the license covers the DB software, not the data a user puts in it.","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":"Against BSD-3-Clause the difference is the source-code duty. Against the GNU records the difference is that there is no license-wide cc:ShareAlike duty, so a compatibility result will treat this license as permissive with a source obligation.","action":"none"}],"family":"Permissive: MIT, ISC and BSD-like","port_of":null,"variant_kind":null,"notes":"Modelled from the SPDX plain text. The source-availability condition is both a duty and a quoted clause, because the detail (no more than the cost of distribution plus a nominal fee, freely redistributable under reasonable conditions) changes what the duty means."}