Open Source Licenses
Open source licenses protect intellectual property freedoms for users of the software.
Intellectual property rights that are of key concern with software are copyrights and patents. Open source licenses grant the free use of these rights to users. However, some licenses introduce restrictions on the use of open source and obligations on the users of the open source software. Traditional licenses restrict rights of users of software, which lawyers are familiar with, which is a vast contrast to open source license which are concerned with protecting freedoms, which lawyers are typically not as familiar with since its relatively new and only recently gained importance.
Some of the key open source principles that licenses protect include:
- The right for any organization to use the software for free and to run it for any purpose
- The right to make copies of the software and to distribute the software
- The right to examine the source code to see how the software works and to see how to adapt it to your needs
- The right to modify the software to your needs and to distribute modifications to the software
- The right to combine the software with other software which may not be open source
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) maintains the criteria for open source licenses and maintains the list of approved open source licenses. Having a set of approved licenses makes open source adoption easier for users of open source software and makes it easier for creators of open source software to have their product used and accepted by IT organizations. The OSI has a set of criteria that assures freedoms are protected in open source licenses. Standardization of licenses is one of the key factors that has made open source software the success that it has become.
While open source licenses all have a number of common characteristics, the two major types of open source licenses are Academic and Reciprocal license. Academic licenses were originally created by universities and grant the most freedom to software users. They allow users to relicense the software or modify the software and distribute it without restrictions. The BSD license was the first Academic license while the MIT and Apache licenses are also well known Academic licenses. Reciprocal licenses place the restriction that modifications made to the software which are distributed must be licensed under the original license thus perpetuating the software as open source. These licenses are also frequently called copy-left licenses. The most common Reciprocal license is the GPL (GNU Public License) while the LGPL (Lesser GNU Public License), Mozilla, and Eclipse are also quite commonly used reciprocal licenses.
