For more information about open source licenses and in particular about the Open Source Initiative's approval process, see:. For over 20 years the Open Source Initiative OSI has worked to raise awareness and adoption of open source software, and build bridges between open source communities of practice. As a global non-profit , the OSI champions software freedom in society through education, collaboration, and infrastructure, stewarding the Open Source Definition OSD , and preventing abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement.
Open source software is made by many people and distributed under an OSD-compliant license which grants all the rights to use, study, change, and share the software in modified and unmodified form. Software freedom is essential to enabling community development of open source software. Skip to main content. Others have independently achieved the same conclusion. Differing opinions exist, but please bear in mind that these are opinions.
Although the SFC states this in no uncertain terms, it expresses "sympathy" to Canonical's goals, and its conclusion focuses on asking Oracle the CDDL's license steward, as the current owners of Sun Microsystems to resolve the issue.
Should Oracle make the original ZFS codebase available under a GPLv2 compatible license—including any of the compatible permissive licenses—this availability would, in turn, grandfather in the later OpenZFS project without need for laborious consultation of every individual contributor. We do not recommend modern use of the CDDL license—it is neither generally useful as a permissive license due to its GPL incompatibility, nor is it likely to be useful as a "GPL poison pill" given the strong stance Canonical and others have taken in belief that legal challenges to the linkage of CDDL and GPLv2 code would fail in court.
Permissive licenses make very few restrictions in the usage, distribution, or modification of covered projects. As a result, one permissive license tends to be very similar to another. The most common restriction in permissive licenses is attribution—in other words, these licenses generally require statements giving credit to the original project in any projects derived from them.
We cover permissive licenses that do not require attribution in the next section on public domain equivalent licenses. Although software surveys performed by Github and Black Duck Software both list the MIT License as the most commonly encountered open source license, we strongly recommend against its usage due to the ambiguity involved.
Since the BSD two-clause license is considerably more clear, both in its own text and in what "BSD two-clause license" refers to in normal use, we strongly recommend its use instead. We recommend the Apache 2. Many of the people who publish their work without any license notice at all just don't want to bother reading or understanding any of the licenses or their implications and mistakenly believe that providing the work without providing a license makes it "free.
We understand the desire not to have to think about licensing, but implore those people to use a public domain equivalent license instead. There is only one OSI-approved public domain equivalent license, and here it is, in its own single-bullet list:.
For the most part, if a license is not OSI approved, you shouldn't consider using it—and you should be wary of using it, as well.
Whether you're looking for strong copyleft, weak copyleft, or permissive licensing, there are plenty of examples in the OSI-approved list and, therefore, no reason to stray. On the other hand, there's only one OSI-approved public domain equivalent license—and the kind of folks who don't find permissive licenses permissive enough tend to be pretty stubborn and may balk even at that.
With that in mind, we'll cover a few of the most notable non-OSI-approved public domain equivalents here. We want to note—again—that we do not recommend the use of any non-OSI-approved license. Using any of these unapproved public domain-equivalent licenses—no matter how apparently free—is a risky proposition.
It's better to use a non-OSI-approved license than no license at all, but doing so runs the risk of disqualifying yourself or your users from patent or even monetary grants. You must login or create an account to comment. Further Reading In , multiple open source companies changed course—is it the right move? A guide to choosing an open source license for your work or project Which open source software license should I use?
Walli Feed Image by :. Get the highlights in your inbox every week. There are several big levers available when considering an open source license: How much license reciprocity is required with respect to the software, modifications, and any derivatives someone develops?
What is said about patent licensing and litigation? What legal jurisdiction covers the license? Other considerations in license choice include: Are there project specific affinities?
Many companies are concerned about their patent portfolios when creating open source projects. Google took an interesting approach to the problem when they released the WebM project. It is the nature of IP law that the owner of the property can license it as many ways to as many people as they choose. Topics Licensing.
About the author. Stephen R. Walli - I am a technical executive, a founder, a consultant, a writer, an international business person, a systems developer, a software construction geek, and a standards diplomat. I love to build teams and products that make customers ecstatic. I have worked in the IT industry since as both customer and vendor. I'm a principal program manager in the Microsoft Azure engineering team.
More about me. Recommended reading Avoid this common open source scanning error. Test cases and open source license enforcement. Give something from the heart to the public domain.
Setting a standard for digital public goods. How should open source projects handle copyright notices? Scott Wilson on 29 Jan Permalink. Stephan Sokolow on 29 Jan Permalink. Paula Hunter on 29 Jan Permalink. Rick, Creative Commons is not typically applied to software, rather other forms of creative expression such as blog posts, articles, photos, course ware, etc.
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