Licensing agreements, the trials and tribulations

Licensing in open source has seen it’s share of trials and tribulations. To start off let me mention some major licenses that are making it’s rounds in the open source community:

• MIT/BSD - this is a very liberal license that allows redistribution even without the source.
• GPL - copy left license. This is a way to negate copyrights to encourage collaborative development. IT essentially grants the following rights - anyone can use the code, anyone can redistribute the code as long as the source is included and distribution license remains GPL, any derivative work created of the code needs to be licensed under GPL.
• LGPL - weaker copy left license, it allows lesser restrictions on making derivative work open source when there is a linking between non GPL and non open source software.
• Apache License

Read more…

Tags: license lgpl gpl