Blogging Roller

Dave Johnson on open web technologies, social software and Java

Gimme credit, gimme fixes, gimme it ALL!

I've been exchanging emails with a developer who has integrated my old Relay-IRC chat client into his gaming web site. The guy doesn't understand the Mozilla Public License and I'm not sure I'm smart enough to explain it to him, but I tried just the same. Along the way, I came up with this.

Dave's dumbed-down explanation of open source licenses.

Here's what you're telling your downstream users when you pick one of the three levels of open source licenses:
  • Level 1: Gimme credit (APL, BSD, MIT)
    You can use, modify and redistribute my code in your product but give me credit (actually, modern BSD doesn't even require credit).
  • Level 2: Gimme fixes (MPL, CDDL, LGPL)
    You can use, modify and redistribute my code in your product but give me the source for any fixes you make to it.
  • Level 3: Gimme it ALL! (GPL)
    You can use, modify and redistribute my code in your product but give me your entire product's  source code.
What do you think; is it too dumbed-down to be useful?
Dave in Open Source Comments [3]

Tags: opensource

Comments:

Post a Comment:
Comments are closed for this entry.

Welcome

You're viewing a weblog entry titled Gimme credit, gimme fixes, gimme it ALL! in the weblog Blogging Roller. If you like this entry then please spread the news:


Related entries

Below are the most recent entries in the category Open Source, some may be related to this entry.







Apache feather

Powered by Apache Roller