Copyrights, Licenses Explained

It just started when I was listening to radio while driving. The RJ used the word GPL for 'Gaane Premium League' ... It reminded me of two versions for the abbreviation. The one that we used during our college time and other which changed the face of software development. This post tries to explain common licensing models and terms used worldwide.

Its hard to understand the legal-speak of license terms and this post tries to capture their essence and make it easy to understand.

This matrix below tries to express some EULA, GPL, CDDL and BSD licenses in terms of the rights in copyrights and patent rights. A ticks and crosses are self explanatory. The gray tilt "~" means that the license does not say anything - mostly it is an implied OK.



Comparing GPL, CDDL and BSD licenses with respect to some common needs of developers who copy, modify or distribute a piece of software:



Honor Open Source: Keep the copyright notices and redistribute source.


GPL is real GPL for proprietary EULA.
-S