Maintaining the openness of OpenBSD got a little more complicated recently when the project leader of what may be one of the most popular modules in OpenBSD decided to re-word his home-grown license to specifically disallow modifications to the source code without his permission.
OpenBSD wants to stay true to its name. The project's published goal when it comes to licensing is simply to strive "to maintain the spirit of the original Berkeley Unix copyrights." The OpenBSD team works to maintain complete openness of the source code, even allowing casual users to look at the source tree and CVS changes via the Web. As a result, recent licensing changes to a key firewall module integrated with OpenBSD have forced its removal from the Unix-derived operating system.
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