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Archive of 2026-10-21 · About this archive · Main site

Author Topic: Choosing Free Licenses for Software, Hardware, and Aesthetic works - Flowchart  (Read 8,232 times)

mouser

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Any help on chooseing which open source/free license to use is a good thing:

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First of course, you’ll need to decide what sort of license will fit both your project and your intentions for how you want to release it.

This used to be more complex, because there were so many competing options, but it’s gotten much simpler because a few free-licenses have become extremely dominant, leaving most of the rest as historical footnotes. I’ll present this as a flow chart and as a series of questions to answer about your project in case you’re uncomfortable with reading flow charts.


http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/choosing_and_using_free_licenses_software_hardware_and_aesthetic_works


Screenshot - 9_26_2010 , 12_26_48 PM_thumb.png

rxantos

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Interesting but incomplete.
They forgot to mention the BSD license and the Apache license, as well as closed source free-ware, and non distributable open source (open for the buyer of the software to make modifications but not to distribute of make a fork).

mouser

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and non distributable open source (open for the buyer of the software to make modifications but not to distribute of make a fork).

rxantos, do you have any links to those or even just license names? i'm quite interested in exploring those licenses.

mahesh2k

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Here is the link to the OS licenses : http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.html

Original address: https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=24111.0