Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer
The Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer (HPND) is an open source license, approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and verified as GPL-compatible by the Free Software Foundation. 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).
| Author | Bruce A. Dodson |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Bruce A. Dodson |
| Published | 9 November 2002 |
| SPDX identifier | HPND |
| FSF approved | Yes |
| OSI approved | Yes |
| GPL compatible | Yes |
| Copyleft | No |
| Linking from code with a different licence | Yes |
| Website | https://opensource.org/licenses/HPND at the Wayback Machine (archived January 29, 2023) |
| Deprecated | Yes |
Variants of this license are in use primarily in older software, including the original BSD kernel. Today, 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.