A way through the license jungle

Currently there are tons of Open Source licenses available: from MIT and CPL to GPL. Actually there are two licenses categories:

• Academic licenses: “Software provided under an academic license is essentially a “gift.” You may use it unencumbered and may relicense your derivative work under a new license of your own choosing.”
• Reciprocal licenses: “Of all the open source licenses, the GPL is the most widely used and is the most influential. Written by the Free Software Foundation’s Richard Stallman, the GPL asks software developers to simultaneously agree to and proffer a bargain to other software developers: “You can use this source code freely, but if you change it and choose to distribute your changes in any form, you must provide your source code to others under the terms of this very bargain.”"

Martin Streicher (from Linux Mag) has written an interesting article, which points out the essentials when dealing with Open Source licenses.It can be found in the IBM developerWork technical library here.

Open source licensing, Part 1: The intent
Open source licensing, Part 2: Academic v. reciprocal

Have a nice day,
Sebastian

Hello world!

This is my first post.