Free Software, how do those licenses really work anyway?

[timbi...@gmail.com]

Greetings FSGers,

I just want to show you all this book published by O'Reilly, it's called "Open Source and Free Software Licensing". The book is free from the O'Reilly Open Books Project, and you can download it online[1]. It thoroughly covers many of the common Open Sources licenses.

One common misconception about Open Source software is thinking that if you use any in your application that you must make your whole application Open Source as well. This is simply not true.

That's just one of the topics explained in the book. It's fairly thick, weighing in at just over 200 pages. If you're interested in learning about Licensing, but not 200 pages of licensing, you can check out the Open Source Initiative's list of approved Open Source licenses online too[2].

One last thing. Stallman[3] is still scheduled to give a lecture here in February next year so we'll be gearing up and preparing for the event.


Hope everyone's finals go well,

---Shaggy


[1] http://oreilly.com/catalog/osfreesoft/book/Understanding
[2] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/category
[3] http://www.stallman.org/