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[Player 3]

A site I found on another forum I frequent.

http://www.tldrlegal.com/

Basically, you can get summaries and information about any particular software license in TL;DR paragraphs.
(Placed in Business as it's a tool involving licenses)

[Nix]

Open source licenses 101:

• don't use GPL if you want to release the binary but not the source code
• everything else is fine and you don't have to pay any attention

[Dacke]

@Nix: Um.. no.

[Nix]

@Nix: Um.. no.

I was "humorously" simplifying it, but that really is all you have to think about when using libraries in close-source projects. You might want to take a *quick* look, but with basically every open source library available, you can categorize the licenses as "GPL" or "other."

Edit: For the record, my favorite open-source license is the MIT license. Strong copyleft licenses (GPL) rub me the wrong way. It's not really free software if you can't do whatever you want with it.

[Hima]

Thanks for the link! Now I have a link to give it to my friends when we're talking about licenses.

Edit: For the record, my favorite open-source license is the MIT license. Strong copyleft licenses (GPL) rub me the wrong way. It's not really free software if you can't do whatever you want with it.

MIT is my favorite as well. And I agree with your comment on GPL. What are they going to do with their software is their business, not mine.

[Dacke]

The term "free software" was coined by Stallman. GPL was created by Stallman to promote free software. So yes, GPL'd stuff is indeed free. But it's not just free, it also guarantees that anything built from it remains free. Free to use and change the code as you want, not free to make money off of it in any way you want (even if that seems to be the American Dream-definition of free)

There are also more copyleft licenses than GPL, for example CC-SA, which is sometimes used on code.

But for libraries, the common choice is LGPL. Which allows people to release proprietary software that uses the library. But if they change the library they have to share those changes. Which makes a lot of sense.