Top Open Source Licenses Explained

An open source license is a binding legal contract between author and user that declares the certain conditions in which a piece of software can be used, which is especially relevant in commercial applications. This license is what turns software components into open source components, allowing developers to use that software so long as they keep the specific terms and conditions laid out in the license.

There are a lot of open source licenses, over 200 in fact. Luckily, nearly all available open source software falls under just a handful of licenses. Here’s a quick and dirty breakdown of each license to help you make broad decisions for your code. Be sure to follow the links in each section for more in-depth analysis of each license.

Types of software license: copyleft and permissive

Let’s first take a look at the general landscape of open source licenses. There are two main categories of licenses: copyleft and permissive. This division is based on the requirements and restrictions the license places on users.

When an author releases a program under a copyleft license, they make a claim on the copyright of the work and issue a statement that other people have the right to use, modify, and share the work as long as the reciprocity of the obligation is maintained. In short, if they are using a component with this kind of open source license, then they too must make their code open for use by others as well. Whether this applies to all of their code or just the modifications they’ve made to the licensed code depends on the license. A permissive open source license is a non-copyleft open source license that guarantees the freedom to use, modify, and redistribute, while also permitting proprietary derivative works. Permissive licenses place minimal restrictions on how others can use open source components. This type of license allows varying degrees of freedom to use, modify, and redistribute open source code, permitting its use in proprietary derivative works, and requiring nearly nothing in return with regard to obligations moving forward.

Top open source licenses explained

There are no good or bad licenses, and no one license is better than another. Anyone can create an open-source license that suits them, which is the reason that there are so many out there. This can make choosing an open source license a complicated business. To help narrow down the decision and make sense of it all, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) put together a list of approved licenses, consisting of a little over 80 open source licenses that are most commonly used.

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