• Title: Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing
• Author(s) Andrew M. St. Laurent
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; Annotated Edition
• Paperback: 224 pages
• eBook: HTML and PDF (201 pages)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596005814
• ISBN-13: 978-0596005818
• Share This:  

Book Description

Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing helps you make sense of the different options available to you. This concise guide focuses on annotated licenses, offering an in-depth explanation of how they compare and interoperate, and how license choices affect project possibilities. Written in clear language that you don't have to be a lawyer to understand, the book answers such questions as: What rights am I giving up? How will my use of OS/FS licensing affect future users or future developers? Does a particular use of this software--such as combining it with proprietary software--leave me vulnerable to lawsuits?

Following a quick look at copyright law, contracts, and the definition of "open source," the book tackles the spectrum of licensing, including:

• The MIT (or X), BSD, Apache and Academic Free licenses
• The GPL, LGPL, and Mozilla licenses
• The QT, Artistic, and Creative Commons licenses
• Classic Proprietary licenses
• Sun Community Source license and Microsoft Shared Source project

The book wraps up with a look at the legal effects--both positive and negative--of open source/free software licensing.

Licensing is a major part of what open source and free software are all about, but it's still one of the most complicated areas of law. Even the very simple licenses are tricky. Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing bridges the gap between the open source vision and the practical implications of its legal underpinnings. If open source and free software licenses interest you, this book will help you understand them. If you're an open source/free software developer, this book is an absolute necessity.

• Andrew M. St. Laurent is an experienced lawyer with a long-time interest in intellectual property, particularly software licensing.

• Amazon

• Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
• Software Engineering
• Books by O'Reilly®

• Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing (Andrew M. St. Laurent)
• The Mirror Site (1) - PDF
• Book Homepage (HTML Edition, etc.)
• Understanding Open-Source and Free Software Licensing (Moqod)

• Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property

  A Complete Guide to the Law of Open Source for Developers, Managers, and Lawyers. This book covers the legal implications of open source and free software licensing and the intellectual property laws that support open source licensing.

• Open Content: Guide to Using Creative Commons Licences

  Provide interested individuals and organizations with practical guidelines for the use and application of open content licences, especially Creative Commons (CC) licenses: How do open content licenses work? How do I choose the most suitable licence? etc.

• Creative Commons: A User Guide (Simone Aliprandi)

  This book is an operational manual which guides creators step by step in the world of Creative Commons (CC) licenses, the most famous and popular licenses for free distribution of intellectual products.

• O'Reilly® Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution

  This book is a collection of insightful and thought-provoking essays from today's technology leaders that continues painting the evolutionary picture that developed in the 1999 book Open Sources: Voices from the Revolution.

• Against Intellectual Property (Stephan N Kinsella)

  The author is to argue that the very existence of patents are contrary to a free market, and adds in here copyrights and trademarks too. They all use the state to create artificial scarcities of non-scarce goods and employ coercion.

• Free as in Freedom (2.0) by Sam Williams

  This book is Stallman's revision of the original biography. While preserving Williams's viewpoint, it includes factual corrections and extensive new commentary by Stallman, as well as new prefaces by both authors written for the occasion.

• Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy

  In this book the authors present lessons learned from their own experiences with open source, as well as those from other well-known projects such as Linux, Apache, and Mozilla.

• Free and Open Machine Learning (Maikel Mardjan)

  This book describes an open machine learning architecture. Including key aspects that are involved for real business use. It focuses on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) machine learning software and open datasets.

• The Architecture of Open Source Applications (Amy Brown, et al)

  In this book, the authors of twenty-five open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program's major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development?

• Producing Open Source Software: Run a Free Software Project

  This is a book about the human side of open source development. It describes how successful projects operate, the expectations of users and developers, and the culture of free software.

• Getting Started with Open Source Development (Rachna Kapur)

  This book gets you started into the fascinating world of open source software development. Using the exercises and case studies provided, you will get good hands-on experience to contribute to and start open source projects.

• The Performance of Open Source Applications (Tavish Armstrong)

  This book is written by over a dozen developers who have grappled with slow code, memory leaks, or uncontrollable latency in open source software. It will help junior and senior developers alike understand performance of Open Source Applications.

• Free Software for Busy People (Mohammad Al-Ubaydli)

  This book will show you how to use free software tools in your company, charity, school or hospital, etc. Using Free Software alternatives to Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop can save you thousands of dollars.

• Open Source Security Tools: A Practical Guide to Security Apps

  This book is a practical, hands-on introduction to open source security tools. It reviewed the overwhelming assortment of these free and low-cost solutions to provide you with the "best of breed" for all major areas of information security.

• Managing Agile Open-Source Software Projects with Visual Studio

  This book is for Agile development teams and their Scrum Masters who want to explore and learn from the authors' "dogfooding" experiences and their continuous adaptation of software requirements management.