Re: comparison of public licenses?

On Wed, Jan 19, 2000, Terry Carroll <carroll[_at_]tjc.com> wrote:
>
> Does anyone know of any comparison of the features of the major open
> source licenses (e.g., the Gnu Public License, the Artistic License,
> Netscape's and Apple's public licenses, etc.)?

I would look at <http://www.opensource.org/>. All the licenses are present there and Bruce Perens, the webmaster, should have some good HOWTO type documents on the license features. You can email him directly as well and he is a very good source of information. I don't think anyone has written a law review yet on the topic; it's just too new. I could be wrong about that though. I plan to write something after the bar exam, as I have studied this pretty intensively.

In a nutshell, GPL says, "if you change it, you have to submit the diff files back to the author." The BSD license says, "do what you want with it but post the Regents of UC copyright notice." And the other licenses by the commercial entities are iterations of these two licenses with added ownership provisions. The Artistic is a variation of the BSD.

GPL = restrictive; BSD = permissive.

What is uncertain is the manners in which copyright will render one or more provisions of the GPL type licenses moot.

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