Free and open source licensing

BANGALORE, INDIA: Within free and open source software communities today, licenses have proliferated to the point that, at the time of writing, there were nearly sixty licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative as open source licenses. From Sun's perspective, the large number of licenses can be streamlined into three main categories based on the attributes of the licenses.

The existence of dozens of licenses poses an undue challenge for someone not intimately familiar with open source, making it difficult to understand the characteristics of each license and the distinctions between them, much less begin to determine how to choose a license. It can make it nearly impossible to answer essential questions, like:

• Exactly how does an organization make its decisions about free and open source licensing?

• To what extent are an organization’s choices influenced by specific projects?

• How are licensing choices influenced by the ways in which communities associated with specific projects define themselves?

The answers to these questions are crucial to understanding the terms on which an organization participates in the open source community of communities. They are also essential to understanding the effects of an organization’s licensing decisions on others.

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