On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 1:16 PM, Aidan Gauland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Jim Cheetham wrote: >> http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=open%20source%20license%20comparison >> Seemed to work for me. Even a Slashdot article with the same title :-) > > I was looking for something a little more detailed than that.
Well, if you want detail, you will have to read the text of the licenses themselves. There is a wikipedia article that classifies the licenses in a useful way, but I hope you've already found that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_license > Would there be much point to releasing a Ruby program under a BSD-style > license, since you can't close off the source code? There is absolutely no point releasing a program under any circumstances, with or without any open license, if you think you would want to close it off later in its existance -- you can't remove the copies already distributed, or prevent the people holding them from redistributing. However, if you own the code itself, you can stop maintaining the previously-released version, and put all your valuable knowledge into making a new closed version that is "better". Have a look at the history of SmoothWall -- originally open source, the owners decided to "close the code" and continue developing. A section of the community took their last released version, called it IPCop and kept it open source. IPCop and SmoothWall are no longer the same, but there's nothing the SmoothWall owners can do to stop the IPCop project from operating. If you have some specific circumstances in mind, try asking the community on the NZ Open Source Society mailing list :-) http://nzoss.org.nz/mailinglists -jim
