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      Home arrow Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) arrow Are there major differences between Open Source Licenses? Tuesday, 07 October 2008      
 
Are there major differences between Open Source Licenses? PDF Print E-mail

Yes there are!!!

First of all, there are licenses which claim to be "Open Source Licenses", but they are not!

A definition of Open Source / Free Software is maintained by The Open Source Initiative (OSI). They also certify licenses and list those licenses on their website. Only trust those certified licenses!

Generally we distinguish 2 types of Open Source licenses:

  • The goal of strict licenses like the "General Public License (GPL)" is to ensure that the software put under the license will always remain free. For example the license does not allow you to include parts of the software into a proprietary software product.
  • The goal of so-called "business-friendly" licenses is to give you the maximum freedom in terms of "do with the software whatever you like". This also means that software under such a license (e.g. a program library) can be included in proprietary software products. Examples for such licenses are the BSD license, all other "BSD-style" licenses, the Apache License V2.0, etc.
 
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