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."

Comments

Nothing to see here

[swelke]

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.