Licenses
In contrast with a proprietary license, the source code of an open source program is made available for review, modification and redistribution. The difference between open source licenses is what we can and can't do with the source code.
Open source licenses can be divided in two categories: permissive and copyleft.
Permissive examples include:
A copyleft example is the General Public License (GPL).
Both categories have the purpose of establishing the copyright holder for the software, granting users the right to copy, modify and redistribute it, protecting the copyright holder from any potential guarantees that the software may provide (software is provided as-is), and optionally imposing some restrictions.
Permissive licenses let us modify a program, redistribute it, and even sell it. We can embed or link code with other programs without restriction or explicit permission by the copyright holder.
Copyleft licenses only allow us to link or distribute code with other code that has the same license. It also forces modifications to be released under the same license. Combining anything with the GPL makes it GPL.
Non-copyleft licenses do not enforce derivative works to also be open source.
Some software is released under a dual license: both a permissive and copyleft license. This provides developers who use the dual licensed code to apply the license that better suits their needs.
Most of the software we use has a permissive license:
- PostgreSQL, PostgreSQL License (BSD based)
- Redis, BSD
- Ruby (MRI), Ruby license (BSD based)
- Ruby on Rails, MIT
- jQuery, Dual MIT and GPL