On Wed, 17 Jul 2002, Karl O . Pinc wrote:
> which license you use.  I want short descriptions of the license
> categories and their relationships to each other.

I wrote something (for Seattle TekBug) that quickly explained this:

 Just as proprietary software often includes an End-User License
 Agreement, open source code generally includes a license. Generally, open
 source licenses can be categorized in three ways: public domain and
 freeware, copyright retained with source available for any purpose (such
 as BSD), and copyright retained with the public changes made available
 for original author (such as GPL).

 Public domain and freeware licensing is the simplest. With public domain,
 the author gives up his copyright -- and basically since no one can own
 the source code, then anyone can use it for any purpose.

 The BSD, MIT, Apache and similar licenses basically have a copyright
 indicating ownership, a liability disclaimer, and then a statement that
 says that the code can be modified, reused, and redistributed in binary
 (aka object code) or source code forms as long as the copyright and
 license is retained.

 The GPL -- the GNU General Public License -- and similar licenses, like
 the IBM Public License and the Mozilla License, are a few pages longer:
 they also indicate who owns the copyright, have a disclaimer of
 liability, and then grant the rights for modifying and freely reusing and
 redistributing the code (which retains the same free license). The main
 difference is that if the software is distributed in binary form, then
 the source code changes must be freely obtainable in a reasonable manner.
 In other words, you may take someone's code, make major changes and sell
 your new product -- but the new software created will be covered by the
 original free license agreement and the source code changes (and
 additions)  must be freely and easily available.

 As you can see, the variety of the different licensing schemes provide
 different methods for developers to promote, protect, or standardize
 their ideas.  Some programmers want to protect their interests by forcing
 that all improvements be returned to them; other developers are more
 interested in having their code and ideas be widely used and re-used.

If you're in the Seattle area, be sure to grab a free Tekbug magazine.

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/