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Academic Vs. Reciprocal Open Source Licensing
An anonymous reader writes "Open source licenses provide the legal foundation for propagation of open source code. This article explores the two most popular forms of open source licenses -- the academic license and the reciprocal license -- and describes the obligations of licensees that accept the terms of each."
Wake up you lazy administrators....
free speech vs free beer.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
almost 12 hours after the story was posted...
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
Could this possibly be the most boring post ever?
I mean, it's been close to an hour now, and only five posts. Yeah, I know we are having some technical problems, but really, this is not the slashdot I know and love. So the only logical explanation is, that this really is the Most. Boring. Post. Ever.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
(something important seems to be missing from your story ... like the comments!)
maybe if the post used hard words like GPL vs BSD it would have been more successful.
Anyway, if I wanted to make a gift to mankind, I would use BSD, if I wanted to make a gift to the opensource community I would use GPL, it's as simple as that.
While I respet Linus's views, I don't think he's licensed to give legal opinion on copyright law in any jurdisdiction. Of course since he's the copyright holder for much of the Linux kernel, he has the right to interpret the GPL as it applies to Linux. However, this does not mean that GNU software from the FSF should be treated the same. If anything, since the FSF are the authors of the GPL you'd expect the reverse.
This is just about the requirement that derivative works be under the same license. All the author is saying is that reciprocal licenses (GPL, etc.) have this requirement, and academic licenses (BSD etc.) don't. Considering the fact that all other license requirements (commercial use, for example) are lumped in together, I'd say the author is just making a story out of nothing.
As a side comment, that sharealike requirement (as the Creative Commons folks refer to it) seems to be the most interesting issue in Open Source/Free Software licensing. For example, do you suppose that Apple would have based OSX on BSD if the BSD license had included the sharealike requirement? It doesn't seem likely.
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over
those are the two most popular forms?
Possibly but lots of high profile teams have been going the no-compensation route. Among them
*) PHP
*) Apache
*) Subversion
*) X
*) Boost
just to name a few
Where is everyone?
The term "academic license" is usually taken to refer either to a lower priced commercial license for academic institutions, or a license of some proprietary piece of software that permits inspection and/or modification only for academic (mostly the same as non-commercial) purposes.
Using the term to refer collectively to MIT/BSD-style licenses is confusing and misleading; there is nothing intrinsically "academic" about those licenses.
I can't help thinking that the discussion on this post has been like so much playground sniggering.
"Level: Introductory"
This is what it says at the top of the article so for so many self-rated sophisticates of the open source world. I have some news. In much of the commercial world there is still a lot of misunderderstanding about what the benefits and potential risks are of adopting open source solutions. This article provides a fine overview into what it is all about and how to make sense of the huge list of licenses that people choose to use, and this can only be a good thing for open source software in general.
Martin, thankyou for a fine article.