







We have to talk about open source licensing.
Everything an open source maintainer might need to know about open source licensing | Ben Balter
There's lots of internet lore around open source licensing. An attorney and open source developer answers the most common questions.

Considerations When Open Sourcing a Project
One of the most frequent questions I receive not only from engineers, but from other lawyers is “we are thinking of making a project available under an open source license – what do we …
Introducing the Permissive License Stack
We believe open-source values are critical to free societies, especially in the digital age. To that end, we’ve created a new approach to licensing invoking the principles of the Default Open Pledge

Licenses Alone Do Not Govern Behavior in Open Source
I put things here so they are on the internet

Licenses – Open Source Initiative
The content on this website, of which Opensource.org is the author, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.Opensource.org is not the author of any of the licenses reproduced on this site. Questions about the copyright in a license should be directed to the license steward. Read our Privacy Policy
Is This the End of Open-Source? | Built In
Open-source licensure empowers governments and moneyed interests over devs. A reckoning might be on the horizon.

Katerina Marchán (@zkat@toot.cat)
Open source maintainers of major projects (hi) are not ready to accept and talk about how the cultural insistence on permissive licensing is just straight up labor exploitation taking advantage of our addiction to popularity (also hi). We’re doing this to ourselves too, you know.
Sustaining Open Source Software
The ‘open source sustainability’ debate continues with yet-another-company relicensing their product away from an open source license to…

Sorting out the Ethical Licensing Mess
Software developers who give the world, for free, usage rights to the code they write often use open source licenses to make this gift legally explicit. These free usage rights (and then some) are …


Time for Net Giants to Pay Fairly for the Open Source on Which They Depend | Linux Journal
Licensing lies at the heart of open source. Arguably, free software began with the publication of the GNU GPL in 1989. And since then, open-source projects are defined as such by virtue of the licenses they adopt and whether the latter meet the Open Source Definition. The continuing importance of licensing is shown by the periodic flame wars that erupt in this area. Recently, there have been two such flarings of strong feelings, both of which raise important issues.
Some startups are going ‘fair source’ to avoid the pitfalls of open source licensing | TechCrunch
New alternative category to 'closed source' could help companies monetize software in the open -- without going all-in on open source.

Open Source is a cost-allocation system
Because the right to use the software is not tied to payment, the license does not connect the people who benefit, the people who decide, and the people who bear the costs. Projects have to build those connections deliberately through governance.

Revisiting the Open Source Business Model
In the past few years, many companies have come to me asking for help drafting a “new open source license.” As a rule, drafting a new open source software license is not a good idea, s…
