Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law

Types of Open Source Licenses

With as difficult a concept as software freedom to contend with, it is not surprising that many licenses have been proposed to implement it. As of this writing, over fifty approved open source licenses are listed at www.opensource.org. Understanding those licenses would be impossible without a licensing taxonomy, a way of organizing those licenses into appropriate categories.

Licenses generally fall into these categories:

• Academic licenses, so named because such licenses were originally created by academic institutions to distribute their software to the public, allow the software to be used for any purpose whatsoever with no obligation on the part of the licen-see to distribute the source code of derivative works. ...