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"A manager's guide to the business and organisational applications of open source technologies" |
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License comparison
There are a huge number of open source and free software licenses. The table below summarizes five of the most important characteristics of some popular licences.
| Public domain | BSD/MIT | ASL2 | GPL2 | LGPL | MPL/CDDL | EPL/CPL |
| Copyright protected? | no | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Code usable in closed source project? | yes | yes | yes | no | yes? | yes | yes |
| May be sold? | yes | yes | yes | no | yes? | yes | yes |
| Modified code must be released? | no | no | no | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Explicit patent license? | no | no | yes | no | no | yes | yes |
The "yes?" for LGPL are there to indicate that there is some legal doubt surrounding this. The information in this table is a summarized form of a Zdnet blog article by Ed Burnette "How to pick an open source license (part 2)".
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