Comparison on Open Source Software Licenses

1.   Degree of Freedom

In most cases, free publication is a sincere present, for the software is developed by those who hope the software to be spread widely as possible as it could. They will be awarded by fame and reputation which are definitely far better than anything, except for the initiative fund of initial public offering (IPO). Sharing knowledge and creating more knowledge are the whole for Richard Stallman during his college life and into which he has been rooted.

So the concept of freedom is the kernel of Open Source. Then the degree of freedom endowed by Open Source Software Licenses will be illustrated by the following figure:

2.   Conflicts of Open Source Software license Between Different Projects

As a matter of fact, borrowing codes between Open Source Software projects will lead you to a legal maze for slim difference cannot be avoided between different licenses. For instance, Mozilla license contains four different license editions and the participants of the project should notice the conflicts between licenses; Galeon is a browser based on Mozilla which was developed based on GTK + Picture Developing Tool Pack. The distribution of Galeon will arouse conflicts between protection modules of MPL and GPL; as the same, Transarc (a subsidiary company of IBM) developed a variant of network file system with Linux distributing pattern based on IBM license. However, IBM license is incompatible to GPL, which leads to the impossibility of installing it on Linux kernel. Scholars abroad have already suggested OSIA paying more attention to the problem of license conflict rather than simply issue a certification.

Due to the existence of differences between Open Source Software Licenses, we have to decide which license we shall choose for our application. From the perspective of development of Open Source Software, if the open source programming package is only used as a tool to create works separated from it, most of the licenses are suitable; if someone wants to publish the software into commercial area and is unwilling to publish his modified source code, BSD is qualified for the purpose because it enables the modifications to be proprietary; if the source code is always required to be free, GPL and LGPL are the best choices; if you want to gain corresponding protection when sharing codes with others, MPL hits for MPL separates software into two parts: the part under protection (open) and the contribution part (closed), which bridge the gap between GPL (absolutely open)and BSD (closed). Therefore, comparison on these Open Source Software Licenses becomes more and more important with the development of Open Source Software.