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O'Reilly Network Open Source The Model for Collaboration in the Age of the Internet [Apr. 13, 2000]

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GPL and BSD explication and comparison 

Martin Cracauer's GPL Page -- interesting critique of GPL that contrasts it to LGPL.

Abstract: The GNU General Public License (GPL), used by many popular free software packages, contains some requirements that makes it hard to use in the real world.

Most importantly, its clause that program modules under the GPL must not be linked with modules under licenses that add any term the GPL does not have, prevent many good software packages from being combined.

There is an alternative license - the LGPL - that has all the power to protect people's own work, but without the extended requirements that serve no other purpose than to force your will on someone else and his work.
Intended audience: People who advocate free software, people who need to choose a license for their free software package, people who want to understand some of the political issues that handicap development of free software.
Required knowledge: You must understand why authors of free software differ in their opinions what to allow others to do with the software they released to the public.

 

Slashdot: GPL vs BSD  discussion

Interesting comment:

...Yes, it can be incorporated into proprietary products. It can also be incorporated into other free software products (including GPL'd stuff). I prefer 2-clause BSDL (as used in FreeBSD and elsewhere) or the X license not because I want to give proprietary software vendors the freedom to use my code (although I don't care if they do; fine by me). Rather, I prefer such licenses because they don't discriminate against other free software licenses. GPL'd code does not coexist with other licenses, period. If you use GPL'd code, your own code must also be GPL'd. If someone wanted to use GPL'd code in some project using some perfectly acceptable DFSG-compliant license (such as Artistic), they couldn't do that. They would have to GPL their own code. The benefit of shutting out potential use of my code in proprietary software is far outweighed by the sheer irritation of shutting out the rest of the free software community. I prefer very lenient, non-GPL licenses because I want my code to be as useful to as many people as possible, and I want a minimum of legalese, and I consider myself to be a programmer rather than some political activist/extremist on an anti-IP crusade.

Another interesting comment:

Re:The flip side by Anonymous Coward Wednesday June 23, @11:17AM EDT  Free speech not free beer you dolt! (Score:1) by cynicthe on Wednesday June 23, @11:21AM EDT (#102) (User Info)  The FSF sells their CD's for quite a bit of money, take a look. They're not starving! And they're probably pretty comfortable. Granted they would rather spend $1000 on a good amplifier, mixer, and axe than a damn Rolex!  Read: http://www.gnu.org/order/order.html  I should then demand the freedom to lock someone up. All I'd have to do to get a bunch of idiot emotionalists on my side is tell them some bullshit fairytale of a battle that was won when the opposition was locked up. When people work 40 hrs a week, feed 3 children, pay $100's in bills, they tend to forget history and you'll be able to tell them anything.  I understand the BSD license, and I know they're doing the same thing GPL'ers. It's just that they depend purely on vague values, ignore the legal and patent minefield were actually living in, and they never consider the principles and conditions that allow the freedoms they're fighting for to exist in the first place. Beyond that they're ok people.  Then there's the BSD pundits (there's a few just like our GPL pundits which are worse than Stallman, Raymond, and Perens all together could ever be on a bad day) you know the wanna-be philosophers who give both their fellow BSDers and GPLers a bad name.  They're the only ones accusing GPL'ers of Communism. I've seen some pretty calm posts from real BSDers.  Here's a message to the wannabe's: Communism was a theory called Karl Marx's Marxist Socialism.  First, that never happened! Second, he was completely wrong! He rejected rationalism (get this) because people around him were not behaving rationally, so he said reason doesn't exist. What did happen was the Communists took the powers of production from the rest of the people.Guess what? Historical Communism as I've just defined it is precisely what "capitalism" is today. Gates is a bastard commie. Capitalism did exist in its intended form back when people worked their asses off to get an invention produced. These days American capitalism is just like the earlier Russian capitalism. They beat us at the capitalist race too. They had a harder time holding on to true healthy capitalism because they tried to sklp the industrial revolution. They ended up with technology that the mass populace was unable conceive practical uses for. When America's industrial revolution took place most people knew about it. What we call capitalism is a load of shit marketting, scamming, spamming, and perpetual litigation. None of that is hard to do if you have the stomach for all the doublethink it involves.  Software is not hardware. It may take time. There's code to write. And sure it takes to compile and debug (do proprietary companies still do that?). But realise this you're comparing a state-of-the-art pail to carry water in to the well. Sure it takes time to build a machine to carry water to your customers. The does not mean you can stop someone from taking their own time and going to get the water themselves. Proprietary companies do this with bullshit NDA's.  There is little water without the the pipes and machinery getting it from the well. There is no software without the PC. Where would you be had IBM won its suit against Pheonix over blackbox blind-engineering their BIOS. The IBM would come in fruity colors by now. There is no market for water is people have to pay extreme prices to get water and aren't allowed to get information to get it themselves. The market lies dormant limited to pure survival purposes.  There is no market for software if the means of production (information, gcc, libraries, source) are taken away. The market lies dormant as purely Visual Basic interface design. No kernel, no document and information management, no personal video editing, no open gaming development. (TRY UNREAL! Four years open development!)  But right now the biggest problem is the legal patent minefield.  Seriously this is the proof of the GPL:  > >>Unlikely. Judging by the window 2000 beta traces they run a BSD stack derivative  > >>close to freebsd - and the BSD license permits such use  > >  > >Which is a good reason to *NOT* release open source code under  > >BSD style licenses. You might as well just send your code  > >directly to Microsoft.  >  > And the problem with Microsoft using all sorts of Unix code is...?  is that they would never admit it, _and_ they would continue badmouthing Unix/Linux/BSD. They simply can take advantage of BSD code whenever they see fit - without acknowledging it and without giving back anything. It's  unethical and abusive, and this is what the GPL prevents. It also drains developers from the BSD space (after all they could now just go and develop networking code for Microsoft), which is bad for the BSD project as a collective effort. These are just a few of the many naivities the BSD license has, and Microsoft Halloween documents pretty accurately point this out. They are afraid of Linux, but they are not afraid of *BSD.  --"World gone crazy, cuz it can't say no." - Bruce Dickinson 1000 Points of Light.

Similar argumentaion:

Most of the comments are very abstract. How about some real life examples?  For me, I rail against the BSD license every day, for two reasons:  1) My place of work uses a variety of tools which run on various Unices, including BSD, but NOT the free varieties. If I want to run BSD I *have* to use a proprietary version. This is only possible because of the BSD license. GPL would not allow the proprietary fork. Proprietary BSD's have marginalized the free BSD's, which is possible because of a poor choice of license.  Linux distributions are not "forks", because *any* Linux product will run on my linux box. At most I might have to install a different libc, or something, to get it to work. I don't have to buy a proprietary Linux.  2) A company I've worked for is basically making widget frosting -- code to run with its hardware. Where did the code base come from? BSD. This company has *no* investment in this code. They want to sell widgets. If it were free code they'd still sell widgets. It won't be free code because the BSD license was sitting there, allowing them to walk off with it. BSD had a valuable code base, which could have been extended. Instead it has been swallowed, because the license allows this waffling. This happens all the time: BSD is undercutting the development of free code.

Recommended Papers

**** Reverse-engineering the GNU Public Virus -- a paper by Stig Hackvän with some interesting points. He's writing a book on Open Source Licensing. See also his dev-Linux the First Hackers' Distributed Republic

GPL = consumer protection + anti-copyright + anti/Law
I draw a rough distinction between the GPL's mandate to share unobfuscated source code and its anti-copyright properties.

Wooing all source code out into the open is an important consumer-protection measure. Tying the source to compiled binaries is good for both the stability of the software and the sanity of developers who rely upon it. It's also good for users tired of being used as sacrificial pawns in the ceaseless battles over platform dominance.

The anti-copyright component of the GPL is perhaps somewhat misguided, but some copyright reform is clearly necessary. Viral infection through contract law between developers is a good way to work out a better consensus on the proper limitations of intellectual property. Copyright terms are way too long for software, and "fair use" provisions have been eroding over time, but dealing a fatal blow to the author's copyright seems unwise. By wholly subscribing to the copyleft worldview, one loses the freedom to hack on copylefted software and later pay off one's bills by charging many users for small fractions of the value of the resulting work.

anti/Law is the contractually
reinforced worldview of one community
locally overriding the statutory worldview
of another one. It's a poetic construct
as much as a legal one.

Although GPL gives me pause, the way in which it undermines the very law from which it draws its power is definitely its most fascinating quality. The GPL is an agreement among peers to collectively disregard state law. I call this property of the license anti/Law.

anti/Law is the contractually reinforced worldview of one community locally overriding the statutory worldview of another one. It's a poetic construct as much as a legal one.

Some intellectual property lawyers question whether the GPL can be enforced, and that issue has never been tested in the courts. But the GPL's expectation is that even the tiniest bit of GPLd source code, combined with your own, can infect your program with the GPL's redistribution terms. And so using the GPL becomes a kind of viral licensing.

The size of the sneeze
A Sufi proverb pretty much sums up the effect of free software's self-dubbed Chief GNUsiance: "Look at the grain of pepper -- and at the size of the sneeze."

While mistrust of Microsoft's greed (and dissatisfaction with its software) is largely responsible for the commercial success of Linux, the attraction to copyleft's subversive mystique (and all that cool source code) drives the popular success of Linux. The emotionally charged promise of copyleft is that artificial barriers to creativity can be eliminated and that information might freely flow to wherever it's needed.

If the Linux Slogans Web page is any indication, then GNU's influence has meant a great deal more than dissatisfaction with Microsoft. The first-place pro-GNU slogan ("Linux: The choice of a GNU generation") beat out the second-place and equally catchy anti-Microsoft slogan "Linux: The Ultimate NT Service Pack" by more than a 2-to-1 margin.

Stallman's unrelenting idealism, narrowly focused on the realms of software self-determination and copyright reform, is deeply affecting the ethical development of an entire generation of hackers. Without question, the current crop of software unprofessionals graduating into the "real world" is a GNU generation, and I think that's a pretty good thing.

Publishing the source code of a flagship software product (such as Mozilla or Java) was unthinkable 15 years ago, but today source code is becoming a prerequisite for operating systems, developer tools, and some classes of applications.

But while many of the ideals of the GNU project are increasingly appreciated, they're not always considered practical. Even within the free-software community, FSF's rigid ideology fuels dissent and its controlling tendencies are regarded with distrust. (See a companion piece to this article, "Radical software environmentalism," for a look at some common compromises.)

Daemon News 199905 Restrictively Unrestrictive The GPL License in Software Development

My Opinions

It is my opinion that the General Public License is not so much about ``keeping free software free'' as it is about forcing us to accept the extreme Communistic political philosophy of Richard Stallman and others at the Free Software Foundation. The very spirit of the GPL is to attack the very concept of Capitalism and individualism. There is no concept of intellectual property under the terms of the GPL. Your hard work is no more your property than everyone else's.

I found myself compelled to write this article because of the over- abundance of GPL'ed software that is flooding the open-source software community. Most of this flood of GPL-ism is because of the increasing popularity of the Linux operating system, most of which is GPL'ed. Indeed, Richard Stallman himself would prefer that we recognize the Linux operating system as ``GNU/Linux'' instead, because of the fact that almost all of the code is GPL'ed. The Linux kernel itself is not a GNU/FSF product, however.

The BSD license suffers from a rather unfortunate name, which has caused it to be less recognized. Due to the popularity of Linux (and the vast assortment of nuts and fanatics who defend it to the death), the BSD license is assumed to have nothing to do with Linux whatsoever. This is not true at all. The BSD license can be applied to the same material as the GPL. Of course, since most of the body of code in the ``GNU/Linux'' system is GPL'ed, there is no hope of ever changing the licensing - they've gone too far to turn back now.

So given all the arguments I've presented here, I hope you can see where I'm coming from. The GPL is not about freedom. It's also not without its advantages. But the fact that the GPL can infect code derived from other GPL'ed programs, as well as the fact that the output of some GPL'ed programs must also be GPL'ed, is unacceptable. In fact, it should be contested over its shaky sense of legality in these matters. I'm not aware of any court cases involving the GPL so far, so we have yet to see what will happen when such an issue arises. I can only hope that the courts will decide against the GPL's habit of infecting other code.

In summary, despite the disadvantages in certain instances, most open source software licenses contribute to the growth and technological and artistic development of software and computer science in general. Both licenses that have been considered here fall under this category, and as such should be considered a valuable resource and a great achievement for the intellectual development of the scientific and technological communities as a whole. Open source software is all about the sharing of ideas and concepts. Programming is as much an art as a science, and it is not wrong to borrow from the ideas of others and to learn from those who have gone before us.

Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski: LG interview :

LM: What were the motives behind changing the license between PHP 3 and PHP 4?

Suraski: There were several reasons. The main concern with the GPL was that commercial companies, such as IBM and others, avoid GPL'd code like the plague. The fact that the GPL is "contagious" discouraged many companies from putting effort into projects that are distributed under it. If we take a look at the few open source projects that IBM endorses, we would find Apache, Jakarta and PHP - none of which is released under the GPL, and we believe it is not a coincidence. These licenses are less restrictive, and we believe they work better in the real world. We also felt PHP was mature enough to let everyone use it, without having to ask for our permission, which is why the permission clause was dropped. Other than that, the license stayed pretty much the same.

Daemon News 1999/06 The GPL vs. Capitalism by Pedro F. Giffuni

Nowadays I personally think that Richard Stallman is a good person but he is confused (I hope he thinks the same of me when he finishes reading this article :), and I am not going to analyze the answers RMS gave because that is not the objective of this article. I arrived, however, to two important conclusions:

  1. the GNU Public License will not save the world,
  2. there shouldn't be a universal license; different situations require different licenses.

The GPL is a long license; sometimes I think it was made so that people would get tired of reading it; something like those big contractas with small letters on it. Until here I had no real problem with the GPL, and since Microsoft was evidently afraid of the rebirth of UNIX (of course Microsoft considers everything a threat), I even considered it a good thing: like most things that are evil, the GPL seems beautiful on the surface. Of course I saw the truth later on...when I saw it and it was clear to me what people that adopted the GPL were doing to the other people. I was aghast. It was not communism or socialism, this was simply and plainly anticapitalism, a game of trying to break the system with it's own logical rules!

Of course no one cares that big software companies that exploit their developers and their customers die, but big companies will have better chances to survive against free software: small companies will simply die. Let's say that you are an independent software developer, such as a compiler writer, and you spend hours, or many years, developing your product; you will find it's very difficult, probably impossible, to compete against a free software product, as egcs, that has many more man-hours than your product.

In capitalist countries people live for money. Careers are expensive, technical people have to live off what they know. Who makes money out of free software? At first glance no one, that's why it's free. Some redistributors and support people make money out of it, but they surely make less than the vendors of commercial products. Free software vendors can offer better prices because they don't have to hire developers, not because they are particularly efficient redistributing software. Most importantly, authors won't receive anything or will receive a misery if they beg for it.

If you don't want money from your code, that's OK, but by releasing software under the GPL you are forcing other software writers to use the same poverty license even if they add significant features to your code. They must also take care in using different algorithms; no one wants to be sued for changing variable names and indentation from GPL'd software.

One of the most ridiculous reasons for adopting the GPL is..."oh but if Microsoft takes my code...", well, what makes you think they will? I understand they bought and paid their own TCP/IP stack, even when the free BSD version was available; they simply didn't want to give credit to anyone. If they take your code and do significant improvements everyone wins, if they don't do any significant improvements the resulting product will probably not sell well, and people can still get your sources; no one will "take away" free software from you.

Boy, I dislike Bill Gates and his practices, but admittedly he learned his dirty tricks in the same economical system, and he gives jobs to the people. If he could offer a good OS with full added value I would buy it, and I wouldn't have any problem with him, or any other developer, becoming rich from his work, in the meantime, Hotmail should have a "Powered by FreeBSD" logo.

It's also ridiculous to choose Linux over *BSD because of it's license: how many people would choose Windows NT over Linux if Microsoft adopted the GPL?? Linux users are usually confused, they adopt Linux because it's popular "and cool" and hide their ignorance in completely subjective reasons like the license or some technical merit that they heard about but they don't really understand.

All in all, Ken Thompson is right: people are choosing Linux, and the GPL, because it's an alternative to Microsoft. I hope this popularity goes by, otherwise I'd recommend Jeremy Rifkin's excellent book on what will happen in the next years.

Of course, this is all my personal opinion and some food for the thought, please don't email me to say that you disagree or how unfair I have been :).

CPUReview Why you SHOULD use the LGPL for your next library by William Henning
Editor, CPUReview Copyright February 1, 1999 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Mr. Stallman writes:

"Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it."

This makes perfect sense from the "GNU virus" point of view: it would discourage the development of commercial software for Linux, however would not encourage the widespread adoption of Linux. We have to remember the massive amount of positive publicity generated for Linux by the availability of commercial databases such as DB2, Ingress, etc.

The commercial software, along with the increased public awareness from the wide media exposure that Linux has received allowed Linux into a number of commercial settings where otherwise it may not have been considered.

We must value the LGPL for allowing commercial usage of library code. RMS admits this in the following paragraph:

"Using the ordinary GPL is not advantageous for every library. There are reasons that can make it better to use the Library GPL in certain cases. The most common case is when a free library's features are readily available for proprietary software through other alternative libraries. In that case, the library cannot give free software any particular advantage, so it is better to use the Library GPL for that library."

At least it seems that we need not fear the glibc license being changed to the GPL. The 'Readline' library is then touted as having brought about the GPLing of an application, and therefore as being an excellent reason for using the full GPL on libraries.

I would suggest that instead of promoting the use of the GPL for software, all that the GPL license for the readline library means is that readline cannot be used for commercial software - or other 'Open Source' licenses incompatible with the GPL.

In both cases, if similar functionality is desired for the project considering a similar library, development effort better spent on debugging or adding features to the software must instead be used to re-invent the wheel.

Fetch your flamethrowers It's time to argue the finer points of software licenses (InfoWorld)

What I can't understand is why they can't coexist. Enemies of the GPL tend to focus on the claim that its originator, Richard Stallman, invented the GPL to destroy capitalism. Whether or not that's true, I personally couldn't give a flying fig. For one thing, people are getting rich selling GPL software. And if I found out the inventor of the knife was a homicidal maniac, it wouldn't motivate me to start cutting my steak with a fork.

Enemies of the Berkeley license attack its potential to be abused. If you have the source code for a Berkeley licensed program, there's nothing stopping you from changing one line of code and making the resulting program closed source and proprietary. It's true. Did you know Microsoft uses the Berkeley FTP program for Windows? But as for abuse, let's get real. Does anyone really think that nobody has abused GPL software?

GPL and BSD explication and comparison by Rob Bos -- an pretty interesting comparison of BSD license and GPL.  He tries to address the problem of incompatibilities between GPL and BSD:

The Berkeley Software Distribution license can be summarised thusly: As minimally restricted as humanly possible. All BSD'd code has one restriction, besides the usual "we will not take responsibility over what you do with this code" -- the copyright notice must be retained, and therefore the copyright of the authors over their code.

That's it. You can distribute it as either binary, source, or either, even under a different license (provided that the terms of the above are met). You can take BSD code, polish it up a bit, and sell it. It is, of course, not in your best interests to ignore the core development community. There are several instances of companies giving large segments of code back to the Free software community -- voluntarily, and not at the request of a legal clause.

This lends itself quite well to the "embrace-and-extend" model of co-opting a market; however, BSD's inbuilt protection is a lot more subtle -- simply the fact that it is extremely expensive to maintain a code fork, especially when the competing code is undergoing the constant revision that free software usually does. Certainly the company could integrate patches from the original, but over time this is not practical. Maintaining a proprietary version of a free project is well-nigh impossible.

The BSD license is attractive to corporations because it allows them to maintain greater control over the code; however, over time it allows an Open Source development community to form, and take over administration of that code. As such, it is superior to GPL in that it greatly eases transition and allows a compromise between proprietary and open development, with decided advantages to both -- corporations can still pretend that the free version doesn't exist, integrate patches, and sell for obscene prices to the end user, but the free version still does exist in the form of the core development community. Code forks can not be maintained, since as you integrate more and more of the patches of the free version, your product ends up approximating the free version anyway, which will do 90% of what yours does -- and for free.

BSD is simple, streamlined, and it works very well in real-life situations. It has been tested in a court of law, it's been around for years, and the bottom line is, it produces good software. The existence of BSD-licensed software such as Apache, XFree, and the larger {Free|Open}BSD software distributions and the community around them is testimony to this.

...

GPL makes far fewer assumptions than any other Free software license does. It assumes that the people will tend to make their software un-free, if left to themselves. This has historically been true -- an individual occasionally crops up in the hacker community that tends to exploit the common code to their advantage. Take Gates, for instance. It's only a matter of time in any community where someone tries to use Free software to their personal advantage. GPL tries its best to prevent this eventual occurance, be it the integration of GPL code into a proprietary product, or the requirement that any derivative products be licensed under the GPL.

The GPL works best only when you have a basic program framework to build from, getting to a slower start but producing more free, user-community-restricted software. The existence of several hundred of these programs is a testimony to the singular effectiveness of GPL towards producing small, efficient, and interoperative software.

...in the opinion of many people, the single most glaring deficiency -- and the greatest strength -- of GPL-licensed products; that is, its habit of excluding proprietary code and applying itself across the superset of code that it is integrated into.

On the other hand, BSD tends to spread its legs to whoever wants to use it; any one can do what they like with it, even if it is at the behest of the development community.

This is why I feel that GPL's proliferation will not hold for large companies as they open source their products.. it's simply not practical for them to do so.

On the other hand, as development shifts away from monothilic software packages packed to the brim with bloat towards small, efficient software packages that do one thing and do it well, involving many more people directly in the development process, GPL will take a firmer grasp in the market. Projects working from the bottom up have no such baggage; no installed base of code to deal with, and most importantly, they can pick and choose techniques and code from other sources.

So, which one? Which will survive, to dominate the computer marketplace?

Neither. Just like all the other holy-war dualities that show up all over the place in the Free software world -- vi and emacs, KDE and GNOME, proprietary and free -- the old BSD vs. GPL holy war will spur the ignorant legions to battle, producing better and better software.

osOpinion Tech Opinion commentary for the people, by the people. By Dave Stanley

I 've thought about the BSD License and GPL, and I've concluded that BSD is the most free intellectual license around. BSD allows anyone the freedom of doing whatever one wishes with BSD code. BSD allows reward through money from proprietary work or the zero cost to great software. I also like the GPL because I can get good stuff for free, but BSD also does the same. The programming language Eiffel is available under both licenses (at tucows). BSD and GPL are good for consumers, particularly students and developing countries. Entrepreneurs who provide great software need payment for that work to make a living. GPL reminds me of the hippie movement and its idealism. At some point, someone has to get rewarded for work, and often that reward comes through cash. Unless the market economy grows obsolete for an economy that favors free production (barter is still a type of market economy), professional software developers will require payment for their work. Humanity seems far off from that Star Trek world where everyone strives for self-improvement and spiritual wealth rather than for material and monetary wealth. Even in Star Trek, a form of capitalism existed on Earth where payment came in the form of "credits"- cashless economy.

The GPL is ahead of its time. Perhaps the interest in GPL software and Wall Streets frenzy over Linux stocks will wane if pure Linux companies can't earn the expected profits that inflated their Initial Public Offerings, or if amateur developers, like the hippies (who became yuppies), get frustrated and jaded over money they could have earned and someone else is earning off their work. I'm certain the GPL is here to stay and will always be the interest of hackers and students developing portfolios of GPL contributions to present to future employers. When the day comes for that Star Trek economy, the GPL may be the one and only license. For now though, the BSD seems like a good transition to that utopian Start Trek world. Business and freedom can co-exist with BSD. Developing nations like Korea (hopefully, the North and South will be one soon) have access to free and superb technology through GPL and BSD and a chance for G7 status. When Korea becomes a "developed" nation, it can sustain a healthy market economy with BSD-like technology.

I favor a temporary copyright for companies that wish to make money, grow and re-invest in R&D, and hold the interest of open-source advocates. For example, if a company creates a virtual machine that transcends any OS, it uses a temporary copyright for 3 years before the code falls under BSD or GPL. This way, everyone wins. Sun probably should have done this with Java. Now Java Personal Edition will splinter into 2 standards, the Sun standard and the EMOC (I think- some acronym anyway) standard. Sun now has incurred the abandonment of IBM who will use its own virtual machine for Java and the distrust of new Java developers. Perhaps another license should be created that allows a temporary copyright. Call it, TCL for Temporary Copyright License and after 2 or 3 years the product falls under BSD or GPL. What do you think?

 

Free software licenses -- by Paul Fisher. Discusses copyleft, open source definition, licensing compatibility, and binary bundling.

Looking at the General Public License and Open-Source Licenses by By Tony Stanco

Free software licenses -- by Paul Fisher. Discusses copyleft, open source definition, licensing compatibility, and binary bundling. Compare with The Open Source Definition

 

Reference

See Google Web Directory - Computers Open Source Licenses for more complete list.