Open Source Software
in
Commercial Products

By:

Dennis Boylan

dennis @ internetassociatesllc.com

Overview

Disclaimer

Examples

Religious Wars

Restrictive Licenses

Partially Restrictive Licenses

Unrestrictive Licenses

Case Study

URLs

Disclaimer

I am not a lawyer

This does not constitute legal advise

Your mileage may vary

Trademarks are the property of their holders

Ditto for copywrite and service marks

Examples

TiVo

Linksys

ZapStation

Snapgear

Religious Wars

Commercial Software

GPL

Restrictive Licenses

GPL – GNU Public License

Must distribute sources if linked with any code which is GPL-ed

Must distribute sources if it contains any code which is GPL-ed

X11 – Similar to GPL

Partially Restrictive

LGPL – Lesser GPL or Library GPL

Must provide sources if you modify library

Must provide sources if you include parts of library directly in your code without library

BSD – Berkeley Software Distribution

Can't change the rights of the original code

Artistic License

Can't claim it is yours

Unrestrictive

Public Domain

Case Study

IPal

Platforms

Windows .NET

Linux CGI

IPal .NET

Commercial development software

No major licensing issues

Not cross platform

C#

IIS

SQL Server

Canned product

IPal CGI

Open Source Development Environment

SciTE, vi

PERL

GCC

Apache/mod_perl

PostgreSQL

MySQL

Template based

Perl Modules

Math::BigInt

Math::BigFloat

dTemplate

XML::LibXML

CGI::Session

Config::IniFiles

IPC::Shareable

DBI

DBD::Pg

DBD::MySQL

GD

GD::Graph

GD::Text

URLs

http://www.b-lan.com

http://www.internetassociatesllc.com

htttp://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Open_Source/Licenses/

http:/www.stromian.com/Public_licenses.html

2003-11-03T14:53:32