Open Source Licences Wars

Posted 21 Aug 2009 at 19:39 UTC by shlomif

There's a new article on my homepage titled "FOSS Licences Wars", which explains about the legal aspects, features and differences between various open-source licences and their categories, and then gives some recommendations for which licences to avoid using.

I also examine the issue of whether using non-copyleft licences (or non-strong-copyleft licences) for popular software poses a risk to the freedom of software in general. One omission from the article is the conclusions from Brendan Scott's study of the BSD licence in the context of Austrlian law. Addressing it here, it seems on the surface to be far-fetched and probably will not hold water in courts, which consider the original jurisdiction where the licence was phrased.

The article itself, along with its DocBook/XML source is being made available under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC-by) either version 2.5 of the licence, or at your option any later version. Redistribution, sharing, or building upon this work are encouraged as long as credit is given.

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This is an ad, not an article, posted 22 Aug 2009 at 19:36 UTC by cdfrey » (Journeyer)

Perhaps you could copy the article here as well instead of just posting a link?

Figure out what your goals are first., posted 18 Sep 2009 at 18:02 UTC by abraham » (Master)

Here is an ancient article I wrote, that end up with different recommendations based on what your goals are. It is slightly outdated (QPL not being that popular anymore), but might still be helpful for some.

How to choose a free software license.