{"id":228,"date":"2007-03-12T07:20:57","date_gmt":"2007-03-12T15:20:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.formtek.com\/blog\/?p=228"},"modified":"2007-03-12T07:20:57","modified_gmt":"2007-03-12T15:20:57","slug":"open-source-which-license","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/open-source-which-license\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Source: Which License?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a lot of debate about what Open Source means.\u00a0 The wide\u00a0variety of licenses\u00a0and business models labeled as Open Source makes it hard to come up with a definition that everyone can agree on.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The sheer number of\u00a0Open Source licenses adds to the confusion.\u00a0 Popular licenses include: GPL<\/a>, Creative Commons<\/a>, BSD<\/a>, Apache<\/a>, Mozilla<\/a>, MySQL<\/a>, Sun’s CDDL<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 OpenSource.org<\/a> list 58 different ‘approved’ Open Source licenses which meet the Open Source\u00a0Initiative’s\u00a010 point Open Source definition<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Of all Open Source licenses, the BSD license is the simplest and most permissive.\u00a0 BSD software can be taken and embedded with software using a different type of license,\u00a0and even resold as part of a\u00a0commercial product.<\/p>\n

EnterpriseDB<\/a>, for example,\u00a0has built a successful commercial software business by building\u00a0proprietary extensions on top of the BSD-licensed PostgreSQL database to create a low-cost clone of the Oracle RDBMS.<\/p>\n

If\u00a0EnterpriseDB software extensions are not licensed as Open Source, how can the company claim to be an Open Source company?\u00a0 Consider what EnterpriseDB has given back to the community.\u00a0 EnterpriseDB is the single largest software contributor to the PostgreSQL project.<\/p>\n

Open Source as a movement dates<\/a> back to 1998 after Netscape made their browser software available under the name of Mozilla.\u00a0 But there are different flavors of Open Source.\u00a0 Just because the source code is available, the code need not be licensed to allow it to be modified or redistributed.\u00a0 To distinguish Open Source projects that permit source code to be modified and redistributed, the term FOSS (Free Open-Source Software) has been coined.<\/p>\n

Many companies now experiment with hybrid licensing business models.\u00a0 MySQL provides four different licenses for gaining access to the MySQL code base.\u00a0 It’s not uncommon now for a company to provide\u00a0an unsupported Open Source community-centric version of their software and also a for-fee commercially licensed version that provides support.<\/p>\n

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There’s a lot of debate about what Open Source means.\u00a0 The wide\u00a0variety of licenses\u00a0and business models labeled as Open Source makes it hard to come up with a definition that everyone can agree on.\u00a0\u00a0 The sheer number of\u00a0Open Source licenses…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more ›<\/a><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-content-management","category-open-source"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}