“The Open Source Initiative (OSI) lists more than 50 approved
open source licenses. Each license is anywhere from slightly to
vastly unlike its neighbors. All of them are written for lawyers,
not mere mortal software developers. So how do you choose the most
sensible an open source license for your projects?“There isn’t one answer for all open source projects, according
to Lawrence Rosen, the founding partner of Rosenlaw and Einschlag,
general counsel for OSI and author of a new book Open Source
Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law. ‘I say,
‘Tell me about your software.’ There are companies that want to
open source some of their [code] and not all of it,’ says Rosen. In
order to advise them, ‘I have to understand what their product
is…'”