Licenses

A variety of license agreements are used to protect Open Source software. Here are a few, for your delectation...

• Artistic License, used by Perl, etc.

• BSD License, used by FreeBSD, etc.

• GNU licenses, used by the GNU Project, Linux, etc.:

  • GNU General Public License (GPL), Version 1.0 (outdated)

  • GNU General Public License (GPL), Version 2.0

  • GNU Library General Public License (LGPL), Version 2.0

• MIT License, used by X software.

• Mozilla Public License (MPL), Version 1.0, used by Mozilla software, etc.

Qualifications for Open Source licenses are addressed in the Open Source Definition (www.opensource.org/osd.html). For a critique of the BSD license, see Richard Stallman's essay, The BSD License Problem.