About Licenses

Regular Programming

How do people learn about licenses?

If you entered into software in a certain way, it's easy to assume that everyone is a part-time license attorney. But how do other people pick up license knowledge? And what does one really need to know?

Licenses underpin open source but seem kind of dull. But they are also a cool and special thing about the software industry.

Lars provides his licenses 101 thoughts and looks forward to becoming open source grandpa.

Links

• GPL
• BSD license
• MIT license
• Apache license
• LGPL
• AGPL - Affero license
• OSI
• Open source licenses tried in court
• Source-available
• Cockroach
• BSL - business source license
• FOSDEM
• Oxide & friends on how they handle the CockroachDB thing
• Forking
• Terraform
• Opentofu
• Elasticsearch
• Opensearch
• Redis
• Valkey
• The Redis-Valkey-story
• The XZ backdoor
• Andres Freund - The Microsoftie who found the issue
• Visual studio code
• VSCodium
• Gitpod
• code-server
• Embrace, extend, extinguish
• Docker
• Podman
• Hashicorp
• Salt
• Ansible
• Terraform
• Stallman
• Compis
• Apple II
• MySQL
• CLA - contributor license agreement
• Kelsey Hightower
• VLC
• Winamp
• Slackware
• Debian
• Coding freedom - book by Gabriella Coleman (full PDF)
• FreeBSD
• Ideell förening
• Moomin dad
• Snufkin
• Pettson
• Jussi Björling
• Gramophone player