Friday, May 11, 2012

Open sourse licenses

Open source software products have special licenses that states that this product's source code is available for anyone to use. Any one can download the code to review it, edit it, and use it for their own needs.
Usually most licenses gives the user the full freedom to use the code without having to pay any fees, the user can use the code for personal use or redistribute it again as commercial or non-commercial distribution.
However some don't give this full freedom to the users, or only allow personal and non-commercial distribution. Such licenses require more restrictions like a requirement to preserve the name of the authors and a copyright statement within the code. Open source focus more on the availability of the source code and the freedom of using it
 The following is a list of open source licenses approved by OSI based on their open source definition:

License that are popular and widely used or with strong communities

Special purpose licenses

Other/Miscellaneous licenses

Licenses that are redundant with more popular licenses

Non-reusable licenses

Superseded licenses

Licenses that have been voluntarily retired

Uncategorized Licenses

 In the future we will compare between Open source and other software licenses like Free software licenses, and Closed source (or Proprietary) software licenses. And provide some more information in details about open source licenses and what's so special about them.
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