What about the different OS licenses?
The term “open source” is commonly used and partly misused for marketing purposes. Pay attention – not everything that claims to be open source is open source in fact! A generally accepted definition of what open source is has been established by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) which also approves licenses. In case you are not sure if the license of a software product chosen by you complies to the Open Source Definition (OSD) standards just check up with OSI whether this certain product’s license is approved or not. Central points of the definition are the distribution of software free of charge, the unlimited availability and distribution of the source code and the obligation to put derived work under the same license. Well-known OSI-certified licenses are GNU General Public License (GPL), GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), BSD license and the MIT license.
Some of the licenses exclude any claims for liability against the software producer. Required legal protection has to be arranged within maintenance agreements with service providers.
Different licenses could be basically represented by following characteristics:
- Source code can be read, used, modified and distributed unlimited.
- Source code can be bundled with proprietary software and redistributed without being under OS license itself.
- Modifications of the OS-licensed source code could stay proprietary in case of distribution.
- The original holder of copyrights retains special privileges over modifications of others.
For internal use of open source software these characteristics do not play a decisive role. However, in case of commercialization of own products with OS components the license of every part has to be examined with special care. Legally defensible in this regard are licenses similar to the BSD license, the MIT license and the Apache license.
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