Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing

by: Tony Lawrence

Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing

Andrew M. St. Laurent

O'Reilly

0596005814

Order (or just read more about) Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing from Amazon.com

I honestly didn't think I'd find this as interesting as I did. As important as licenses are, an annotated listing of them didn't sound like anything I wanted to flop back on the couch with. However, the author has managed to make this both interesting and educational.

It covers all the common open source licenses, explaining what each section means, and digging into problems that might come up for the licensor or licensee. Open Source isn't all that it covers: standard shrink-wrap licenses are examined, as is Sun's Community Source License and Microsoft's "Shared Source Initiative".

Finally, the book itself is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license. It is interesting that O'Reilly is willing to publish works like this, but I'm glad they are.