License: is it "modified BSD" or just "BSD-3-Clause"?

[vlsi]

RSyntaxTextArea license is declared as "modified BSD license", however:

1. It looks pretty much like https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html
2. The license link at http://bobbylight.github.io/RSyntaxTextArea/ page does not work (it produces 404)

Could you please clarify if https://github.com/bobbylight/RSyntaxTextArea/blob/d3722e5805c086b758e2e5c03d796304a7589d73/RSyntaxTextArea/src/main/dist/RSyntaxTextArea.License.txt is up to date?
Could you please clarify how the file differs from BSD-3-Clause?

As far as I can compare the above RSyntaxTextArea.License.txt with "SPDX version of BSD-3-Clause" I fail to find differences.

[vlsi]

PS. It would be great if you could include LICENSE file to the root of the project so everybody (including GitHub UI) can see the license

[vlsi]

PS. Thanks for the project. I discovered this issue while analyzing licensing for third-party software used by Apache JMeter

[bobbylight]

I used the terminology "modified BSD license" for the reasons described here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#3-clause_license_(%22BSD_License_2.0%22,_%22Revised_BSD_License%22,_%22New_BSD_License%22,_or_%22Modified_BSD_License%22)

That was a long time ago, but I wanted a liberal license to facilitate the library's adoption and it seemed that the modified/3-clause was the way to go. From your comments I gather the 3-clause version is pretty standard now, and the term "modified" is confusing?

[vlsi]

SDPX is a standard way of assigning license ids: https://spdx.org/licenses/

The below summarizes #299 and #300

So

1. Please add Bundle-License: BSD-3-Clause manifest entry (where BSD-3-Clause is SPDX identifier, see https://osgi.org/specification/osgi.core/7.0.0/framework.module.html#framework.module-bundle-license )
   Adding explicit Bundle-License would simplify automatic analysis.

2. Please add LICENSE files to the produced jar files as META-INF/LICENSE file.
   The thing is the license requires re-distributions to reproduce copyright notice, however it is really hard to do that in an automatic way, taking into account rsyntaxtextarea.jar is often taken from Maven Central. The jar file just misses NOTICE file, so it is really hard to reproduce copyright notice and track it for all rsyntaxtextarea upgrades.

3. You might want to use BSD-3-Clause in the pom file as well. Current license name in the pom.xml is "Modified BSD License". Using BSD-3-Clause would help even humans to recognize the license and comply with it better.

[bobbylight]

Hopefulliy this is all wrapped up in the master branch and will be in the next release.