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Open source licences

I've been interested in open source software for about a year now and one of the things that confuse me about it is the number of different linceces. I more or less understand the major ones (or at least some of them -- GPL, BSD) but I know there are dozens of different ones. Quite a mess, IMO, and I think it makes thing very difficult for everyone. Are the experts expecting that this situation will stay, or will there be convergence in the licences?


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I doubt there will be any convergence in the licenses.

There are a lot of different licenses due to a few legal factors:

  • Due to the difference in legislation in different countries, some licenses produce legal issues and therefore other licenses were created.

  • Some lawyers didn't feel that some of the existing licenses reflected the complete protection their clients needed. This is more obvious with licenses that were created in a corporate environment where some corporate released some code into the public (take a look at Apple Public Source License, Eclipse Public Source License, IBM Public License, Intel Open Source License, etc - there are a lot more of these... really).

Other issues that are usually different in approach and legal terms from one open source license to another are:

  • Credit - whether you need to give it or not
  • Releasing the modified source code - some require it some don't.
  • Source can be linked with source released under a different license
  • Source can be bundled in a commertial product

You can see almost all available open source licenses here.

I'm not a lawyer so I cannot give a legal review of the legal implications of the different licenses, but the points I've mentioned above are some of the most common ones.

 
Posted 2006-08-29T10:34:05Z
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Convergence is unlikely, since it would require the cooperation of all contributors to the existing code.

Fortunately, the majority of open source code is licensed under the GPL or GPL-compatible licensnes (e.g., BSD). The most important uses of other free software licenses are in certain large "independent" projects such as Mozilla and Eclipse, where the legal interaction with the GPL world is relatively low.

If you need to choose a license and don't have special needs or involvement with those special projects, stick with a GPL (or compatible) license.
Posted 2006-09-21T20:52:50Z
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Cogito ergo sum. René Descartes

The Free Software Foundation, headed by Richard Stallman, introduced GPL LGPL and FDL. They are described on FSF-licensing

Posted 2006-12-01T17:42:27Z
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