“There are many ways to license open source software. Given the
attention paid recently to the General Public License (GPL) and its
latest version (GPLv3), you may be interested to know that there
are other licenses that satisfy the principles of free and open
source software without the confusion and polemics that surround
the GPL. Other open source licenses have been approved by Open
Source Initiative and adopted by commercial companies and by open
source projects. Most of those other licenses are professionally
written by lawyers to express clearly the licensing objectives of
software copyright and patent owners and to ensure that they are
valid and enforceable in all important jurisdictions.“I wrote one of those licenses, the Open Software License. The
third version of this license, OSL 3.0, was approved by Open Source
Initiative in 2005. This article explains why it is a better
license for software than the GPL…”
Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.
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