News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is fa... by Sydneyco on Thursday March 17, 2022 @11:49AM (#30712466)
Does anyone recommend some documentations to know all the licences vs open source?

I'm thinking of launching one of our project in open source but don't want to end up in this kind or articles ^^

Re:Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is fa... by mindcrime on Thursday March 17, 2022 @12:12PM (#30712741)
Neither is super up to date, but these should cover the important stuff:

- Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing[1]

- Open Source Licensing[2]

And then Producing OSS[3] also contains a (very) brief section on choosing a license. It's worth reading though, for other reasons.

[1]: https://people.debian.org/~dktrkranz/legal/Understanding%20O...

[2]: https://www.rosenlaw.com/oslbook.htm

[3]: https://producingoss.com/en/producingoss-letter.pdf

Re:Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is fa... by warp on Thursday March 17, 2022 @11:57AM (#30712565)
https://opensource.org/licenses/category is the list of all Open Source licenses vetted by the OSI (open source initiative).

Other licenses may be open source, but you'd probably have to get lawyers involved to make sure. So it's better to just pick a license which the OSI considers Open Source.

If you don't want to rely on just the OSI, you can also check what the Free Software Foundation, Debian and Red Hat think of the license you've picked.

Re:Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is fa... by account42 on Friday March 18, 2022 @06:51AM (#30720566)
Moreover, picking an existing popular open source license is important because a and b being opensource licenses does not mean that they are compatible, i.e. they could still have mutually-incompatible requirements that prevent anyone from releasing a combination of a-licensed and b-licensed code.
Re:Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is fa... by glind72 on Thursday March 17, 2022 @11:54AM (#30712528)
You could look at the OSI here for open source definitions. https://opensource.org/licenses/category

A number of Affero GPL type license have started to emerge and the community source. We started working on our own version here to allow us to still monetize or share restricted versions with fewer legal concerns: https://github.com/buildlyio/communitysource

Re:Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is fa... by rectang on Thursday March 17, 2022 @01:52PM (#30713983)
For people in your position, I like Van Lindberg's book, Intellectual Property and Open Source: A Practical Guide to Protecting Code.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/intellectual-property-a...

It will help you understand the relevant parts of the law (copyright, patent, trademark) as well as helping to differentiate between various types of Open Source licenses.

Re:Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is fa... by jayp1418 on Thursday March 17, 2022 @02:52PM (#30714593)
Re:Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is fa... by colejohnson66 on Thursday March 17, 2022 @11:52AM (#30712493)
Take a look at the popular licenses from the OSI: https://opensource.org/licenses