Mike’s Digital Laboratory

Bruce Perens on Open Source License:

The Open Source initiative has, to date, approved 73 licenses. How many do you really need? If you’re a company or individual producing Open Source software, no more than 4. And you can get along with just 2 of them.

It’s hard enough trying to explain what open source licensing is to the legal department, but just go ahead and trying explain the differences between all 73 existing licenses.  Forget about it. I like Bruce’s idea.  Let’s just settle on a handful we an all agree on and simply things a bit.

Here’s Bruce’s final four:

1. Gift license: The Apache License 2.0

This is similar to the MIT and BSD licenses, but provides a little more protection from software patent lawsuits to the Open Source developer.

2. Sharing-with-rules license: GPL 3

Descended from the GPL, the most popular Open Source license, this license is updated to deal with the vastly larger amount of copyright and case law that exists today.

3. In-between license: LGPL 3

This is for making software libraries under the “sharing with rules” paradigm, but which are usable in proprietary software.

4. A special license to cope with the SaaS phenomenon: Affero GPL3.

This license is specifically engineered to keep Google from running away with your product without sharing their improvements to it. Well, actually, it deals with the software as a service problem. The GPL class of licenses does not require that anyone share source code until they actually distribute the software. But Google doesn’t distribute software, it performs it on its own site.

Works for me, this  simplifies the situation.  You  only need to understand two licenses Apache and GPL3.  The last two are simply GPL3 variants.  (Read  Bruce Perens article for more on this.)