October 2005
Beginner to intermediate
302 pages
10h 1m
English
Content preview from Producing Open Source SoftwareBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 9. Licenses, Copyrights, and Patents
The license you select probably won’t have a major impact on the adoption of your project, as long as the license is open source. Users generally choose software based on quality and features, not on the details of the license. Nevertheless, you still need a basic understanding of free software licensing issues, both to ensure that the project’s license is compatible with its goals, and to be able to discuss licensing decisions with other people. Please note, however, that I am not a lawyer, and that nothing in this chapter should be construed as formal legal advice. For that, you’ll need to hire a lawyer or be one.
Terminology
In any discussion of open source licensing, the first thing that becomes apparent is that there seem to be many different words for the same thing: free software, open source, FOSS, F/OSS, and FLOSS. Let’s start by sorting those out, along with a few other terms.
- Free software
Software that can be freely shared and modified, including in source code form. The term was first coined by Richard Stallman, who codified it in the GNU General Public License (GPL), and who founded the Free Software Foundation (http://www.fsf.org/) to promote the concept.
Although “free software” covers almost exactly the same range of software as “open source,” the FSF, among others, prefers the former term because it emphasizes the idea of freedom, and the concept of freely redistributable software as primarily a social movement rather than ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.