What legal jurisdiction covers the license? Other considerations in license choice include: Are there project specific affinities? Many companies are concerned about their patent portfolios when creating open source projects. Google took an interesting approach to the problem when they released the WebM project. It is the nature of IP law that the owner of the property can license it as many ways to as many people as they choose.
Topics Licensing. About the author. Stephen R. Walli - I am a technical executive, a founder, a consultant, a writer, an international business person, a systems developer, a software construction geek, and a standards diplomat. I love to build teams and products that make customers ecstatic. I have worked in the IT industry since as both customer and vendor. I'm a principal program manager in the Microsoft Azure engineering team. More about me. Recommended reading Avoid this common open source scanning error.
Test cases and open source license enforcement. Give something from the heart to the public domain. Setting a standard for digital public goods. How should open source projects handle copyright notices?
Scott Wilson on 29 Jan Permalink. Stephan Sokolow on 29 Jan Permalink. Paula Hunter on 29 Jan Permalink. This classification is only a guideline and should not be used to make decisions about using open source software governed by each license. Permissive licenses generally do not have real limiting conditions.
Rather, they usually require that you keep the copyright notice in place when you distribute your own software. This basically means that you can use and change the open source software as needed as long as you keep the copyright notices intact. Some top open source licenses in this category are the Apache and MIT licenses. We rate permissive licenses as LOW risk licenses. Semi-permissive licenses usually require that if you modify the open source code, you make these modifications available under the terms of the given license.
Some of these licenses explicitly define what a modification is. For instance, they might consider copying unmodified open source code into proprietary code to be a modification. To comply with the license obligations, the developer would have to release the source code original, modified, and newly added. The most popular open source licenses in this category include the Mozilla and the Eclipse Public Licenses. However, we must recognize that this strategy did not succeed for Ogg Vorbis.
Even after changing the copyright license to permit easy inclusion of that library code in proprietary applications, proprietary developers generally did not include it. The sacrifice made in the choice of license ultimately won us little. For all other libraries, we recommend some kind of copyleft.
Unlike the first case, where the library implements an ethically superior standard, here adoption for its own sake will not accomplish any special objective goal, so there's no reason to avoid copyleft entirely. However, if you require developers who use your library to release their whole programs under copyleft, they'll simply use one of the alternatives available, and that won't advance our cause either.
The Lesser GPL was designed to fill the middle ground between these cases, allowing proprietary software developers to use the covered library, but providing a weak copyleft that gives users freedom regarding the library code itself.
For libraries that provide specialized facilities, and which do not face entrenched noncopylefted or nonfree competition, we recommend using the plain GNU GPL. If it is likely that others will make improved versions of your program to run on servers and not distribute their versions to anyone else, and you're concerned that this will put your released version at a disadvantage, we recommend the GNU Affero General Public License AGPL.
The AGPL's terms are almost identical to the GPL's; the sole substantive difference is that it has an extra condition to ensure that people who use the software over a network will be able to get the source code for it. The AGPL's requirement doesn't address the problems that can arise for users when they entrust their computing or their data to someone else's server.
It's a strong copyleft license for educational works, initially written for software manuals, and includes terms which specifically address common issues that arise when those works are distributed or modified. For short, secondary documentation works, such as a reference card, it is better to use the GNU all-permissive license , since a copy of the GFDL could hardly fit in a reference card. Some documentation includes software source code. For instance, a manual for a programming language might include examples for readers to follow.
You should both include these in the manual under the FDL's terms, and release them under another license that's appropriate for software. Not to worry. An important note: There are two additional parts to the process of applying an open source license. These are a copyright statement and a warranty disclosure. While this blog will focus narrowly on choosing the right open source license for your project, you can get more information on the copyright statement and warranty disclosure in our post on applying a license to an open source software project.
An open source license outlines the responsibilities taken on by those who use your software. Open source software is often distributed widely and used in other software programs.
Using a specific license also gives your software legal protection. You can use it to take legal action against those who violate the terms of the license. But if you plan to release your software for others, including companies, to use, you need a license to dictate how you want your software to be used and distributed.
There are two basic types of open source licenses: permissive and copyleft. Permissive licenses live up to their name by allowing users to do just about anything they want with the code.
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