DevNotes

Concise, Handy and Elegant Notes for Developers

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Open Source Licenses

I have been checking out different open source licenses recently. I made a few notes for future reference for myself.

MIT & BSD 2-Clause

The most permissive license. It allows people do anything they want with your code as long as

  • they include a copy of the license and copyright notice with the code
  • do not hold you liable.

BSD 3-Clause

Basically the same with MIT license, and will protect contributors trademarks explicitly. So the names, trademarks, logos may not be used by the users for promotion.

Apache

Besides the requirements as BSD 3-Clause, it provides an express grant of patent rights from contributors to users

GPL

When distributing derived works, the source code of the work must be made available under the same license. Good for open source codes and free software, commercial usage should avoid including this one.

LGPL

If you only use the library, it is fine to keep your code private, otherwise if you modify the code and distribute it, the works should be licensed under the same license.

References:

  • http://choosealicense.com/
  • http://choosealicense.com/licenses/
  • http://opensource.org/licenses