The world of open source is indeed a pretty interesting one at that, it’s a wonderful world that offers too many opportunities that proprietary solutions couldn’t even dream about. What makes this technology free and marvelous is the many number of open source licenses that allow people the freedom to use the ‘open’ stuff and improve upon the same.
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software: to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation’s software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it.
The MIT License is a free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It is a permissive free software license, meaning that it permits reuse within proprietary software provided all copies of the licensed software include a copy of the MIT License terms. Such proprietary software retains its proprietary nature even though it incorporates software under the MIT License.
The Apache License is a free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The Apache License requires preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer. Like other free software licenses, the license allows the user of the software the freedom to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software, under the terms of the license, without concern for royalties.
BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the redistribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have reciprocity share-alike requirements. The original BSD license was used for its namesake, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system. The original version has since been revised and its descendants are more properly termed modified BSD licenses.
The Eclipse Public License (EPL) is an open source software license used by the Eclipse Foundation for its software. It replaces the Common Public License (CPL) and removes certain terms relating to litigations related to patents.
The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free, open source, and detailed software license developed and maintained by the Mozilla Foundation. It is characterised as a hybridisation of the modified BSD license and GNU General Public License (GPL) that seeks to balance the concerns of proprietary and open source developers.
Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) is a free software license, produced by Sun Microsystems, based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL), version 1.1. Files licensed under the CDDL can be combined with files licensed under other licenses, whether open source or proprietary. The Free Software Foundation considers it a free software license that is incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL).
In computing, the CPL (“Common Public License”) is a free software/open-source software license published by IBM. The Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative have approved the license terms of the CPL.
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