Posts Tagged ‘open source licenses’

I have a project and like to license it under an open source license that allows people to:
- use the code as they want to (even commercially)
- license derivatives under other open source licenses in a way that follow at least these restrictions of the project’s license, but do not necessarily have to be identical.
- give credit to my work

I wanted to use the GPL, but as I understand it, the derivatives must also be GPL, which I find rather restricting…

Thanks for your opinions.

In a commercial software company, it is common practice for software developers to download free open source and incorporate that source within their own software. Most developers ignore the license obligations that come with the software. They usually think that because the software is royalty free, the license obligations probably don’t matter. In many cases, though it does matter, at least if the software developer is using the open source software inside the commercial product, and distributing the open source to external customers.

Open Source comes with a variety of licenses. Some like public domain have no restrictions or obligations for the software developer using, distributing, or modifying either the source code or the object code. Other licenses, though, can have restrictions on distribution or modification of the software, and can impose obligations on attribution and re-distribution of the software.

For approximately 60% of the open source packages, there is also a provision called “copy-left” which can go viral, and contaminate the proprietary commercial software which is not open source. For many commercial software developers, this is considered unacceptable.

Of course, many organizations have neglected these open source obligations, which has recently led to a series of lawsuits. In most of the lawsuits, the courts have ruled that open source license obligations are enforceable, even if no money changed hands. Thus, it is no longer a prudent option for commercial organizations to download and incorporate open source inside their commercial products without attending to the license obligations that come with that open source.

All of this leads to the need for the commercial software developer to create polices about incorporating open source inside the commercial software.

Essentially, the commercial software organization needs to decide which open source licenses contain obligations and restrictions which are acceptable to that organization, and which licenses are not acceptable. For example, the organization could create an approved license list, for example (Public Domain, BSD, MIT, Apache, SUN Binary License, Common Public License and its derivatives), while considering other license such as GPL or LGPL not approved.

The organization should also audit its current commercial software to understand a census of open source inside. Any open source inside which does not meet the organization’s policy as posing acceptable obligations and restrictions, should be replaced.

This policy should then be enforced going forward, ie, when a software developer downloads open source and considers incorporating it into the commercial software, the policy should specify whether the license that comes with that open source is an approved license for that organization or not. There should be a review board that would review new submissions to decide if new licenses should be added to the approved list.

Author: Korak Mitra
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Canada duty

As a programmer, I am impressed by the quantity and quality of open source software products. A couple of the best ones I’ve personally used are: jEdit and FreeMind. I support the open source concept, but am concerned that it negatively impacts programmers’ income potential. Becoming an open source consultant would probably be the best way of making a living from writing open source code. How else can a programmer make a living from open source code?
Some additional questions… Can one legally repackage and resell open source? Are there standard types of open source licenses?

I’m often asked to elaborate on what exactly ‘Open Source’ really is. It’s easy for those of us involved in the software industry to expect everyone to understand the terms that we use on a daily basis and sometimes, it’s great to have someone stop us and say “explain this to me”.

This is my attempt at clarifying exactly what Open Source really is!

I’ll start with a summary of the definition of Open Source. You can find the full text behind this at opensource.org/docs/osd.

1. Free Redistribution – Open Source software should not be licensed for a fee, or be sold.
2. Source Code – The source code for the software must be distributed with the package or easily obtainable and must be in a format that any competent programmer could be expected to be able to work with.
3. Derived Works – Modifications to the software resulting in new, derived works must be allowed which can then be distributed under the same terms as the original license.
4. Integrity of the Author’s Source Code – Open Source licenses may require that the software is distributed without any changes, but only if they allow the software to be re-built using patch files to produce a derived work at build time.
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups – Open Source licenses must not discriminate against anyone.
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavour – This means that Open Source software should be licensed in such a way that it can be used for anything – whether big business or genetic research – without imposing any restrictions.
7. Distribution of License – The terms of the license must apply to whoever the software is distributed to.
8. License Must Not be Specific to a Product – If the software is distributed as part of a larger overall package, the license must not restrict anyone from extracting an individual component and distributing this under the same terms.
9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software – This essentially means that a piece of Open Source software is licensed as a complete, discreet entity. The license must to restrict this entity from being distributed along with any other form of software (Open Source or Commercial).
10. License Must be Technology Neutral – It must be possible to view the license without needing to run specific, targetted software. This usually means that the license is distributed as plain text, rather than something like PDF.

So that’s the definition out the way, but what does it actually mean?

In practice, it’s coming to mean “great software at no charge”! Open Source is becoming a real threat to commercial software vendors – just look at how Firefox is making inroads as a Web browser!

The big differentiator with Open Source that has come about but isn’t part of the definition, is that these applications are built by diverse teams of volunteers who give up their time to make technology better. They’re not motivated by profit drivers of any kind – they just take pride in their work and want to make great technology available to as wide an audience as possible.

So now, we could choose to have a computer which runs a free operating system (Linux) with a free browser (Firefox) and free office software (OpenOffice). With a little time to get familiar with this setup, you could still work with all your existing files and documents, and still operate effectively, but without the headache of continual update costs!

So that, essentially, is Open Source. If you have any more questions or suggestions relating to this article, please feel free to get in touch and I’ll do my best to provide an informed response!

Author: John Landells
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Pressure cooker