Grant Skinner has been thinking about and researching open sources licenses. I think this is a timely blog post that everyone involved in software should take a look to get a quick high level understanding of the most popular open source licenses. As Grant puts it:

I think there is a critical lack of understanding about the implications of different source code licenses in the Flash and Flex world. As my company has grown, and we have tackled more critical projects for larger clients, I have had to educate myself and my team on this topic.

He comes at it from an interesting perspective for the following reasons:

1- Grant runs a software development company, so has to be concerned about making money and delivering quality(no big sugar daddy or legion of volunteer developers)
2- His company sells commercial closed sourced components
3- They also distribute freely available source code that is equally valuable
4- They use open source code in their client projects

Grant compares and contrasts the following licenses: Implicit Copyright, GPL, LGPL, MPL, BSD, Apache, MIT, Public Domain and Creative Commons.

His conclusion is that most code you release should be either MIT or sold commercially. I'm wondering if anyone has any arguments for using GPL? It seems to be regarded as a business friendly license for commercial software vendors who want to open source all or parts of their application, I guess the main benefit is that your competitors couldn't just resell your code without open sourcing it.

I'm pretty much a newbie to open source, the licenses and business models around it but I'm very interested for certain projects we're working on at Nitobi. So stay tuned while I post interesting notes here on what I find.

Read more from Andre Charland.