







Non-judgmental guidance on choosing a license for your open source project
Choose an open source license
Non-judgmental guidance on choosing a license for your open source project
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 …
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…

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



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.

The wrong first question: Which open source license?
When thinking about creating an open source project, starting with the question which license to choose is the wrong approach. Rather, you should ask yourself: Why am I creating this open source pr…

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

Invasion of The Ethical Licenses
About 23 years ago, I created the Debian Free Software Guidelines to help the Debian developers decide what software was permissible to include in Debian, which aspired to be 100% Free Software, and what should be consigned to a "non-free" repository upon which Debian would never depend. Nine months later, those guidelines became the Open Source Definition, and I announced Open Source to the world.
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

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.

Solving the Commercial Open Source Licensing Dilemma With Triple-Licensing
As you may have noticed, the move away from approved open source licenses to commercial almost-like-open-source licenses by single-vendor-owned open source projects has created a lot of bad press f…

First Read: The Fair Source License
Text and my first thoughts on a new, non-open source form license
