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What licenses are the best for open sourcing web applications?
It depends on your licensing goals.
If you just want the code to be widely usable, MIT or 3-clause BSD work fine.
If you want to require redistributions of your code to be under the same license, GPL works.
If you want to require deployments of your web application to distribute its source code, with any modifications, then you'll need the AGPL.
If you are fine with your application being used as the basis for a proprietary web service, then just pick a standard license (BSD, GPL, MPL, whatever) using the same criteria as for other projects. If you want to prevent that, however, the only option I know of is AGPL, which requires that installations provide source to their users. Then BigBucksServiceVendor can set up an installation, tweak it, and charge users to use it, but they must provide their source code so that someone else can do the same as well.
The AGPL also, though, is not near as widely used as many of the other licenses. That may impact your decision.
The answer for the "best" depends too much what you hope to accomplish, so a concrete answer is impossible.
If you would like to know more about the types of open sources licenses and what they offer, Wikipedia is a great place to start.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_license
Despite the multitude of open-source licenses, there are probably only a few you can realistically choose from when it all boils down. As Mike was saying, it all really depends on what you're looking for.
Realize that open-sourcing is just another form of license protection, so deciding for yourself the terms under which you want it to be released will greatly affect which license you choose. Do you want to allow commercial endeavors to profit from your work? What if someone were to modify your code significantly into their own derivative product... can they distribute it (for free or not) without also distributing the original or at least linking back to you? Do you care if anyone gives you credit at all for your work? These are just a few questions that should probably be answered before you head too far down this road.
I'd recommend taking a look at a few wiki pages -- specifically, investigate the difference between permissive and non-permissive licenses, as these are the two major types of open-source license. When you get around to figuring out what exactly you want to protect and how you'd like to protect it, that's when I think the right decision will become clearer for you.
Pick a License, Any License
There are a variety of options depending on what you're looking for. There is a very good article on Wikipedia describing many of the licenses and what it means to use a specific license.
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If I make a (web-based if it matters) game and have the inventory portion of it from an open source inventory program, what do I disclose?
I would say part X came from open source, or I just "hacked" then inventory system and put my game as a front end.
I just don't know where I put that on my website, or do I wait until someone asks? Does this mean my part of the software is also open source? What am I supposed to do?
I'm not sure how to ask it. I want to do the right thing and all.
It depends on the license that the open source inventory program is under. Have you looked into that yet?
This is a good place to start for comparisons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_software_licenses
You have not asked much specific with your question. The general answer is: It depends.
On what does it depend you might then ask yourself. It depends on the usage terms of the software you make use of.
You only have shared so far that the software is "open source". That term does not say much. It could mean you refer to an OSI certified Opensourcetm license, however, you wrote "open source" which might be a different term. Probably you have picked something from github (compare: Can I use the code in a Github project which does not have a license specified?) ?
So unless you do not share which kind of license that is you talk about not much could be said:
If it is a permissive Free Software license, your code can normally stay under it's own license.
If it is a copyleft Free Software license, your code normally is being licensed under the same license.
If it is a compromise license, it depends on the type of work and way of interaction / derivation / usage / packaging.
In any case it always depends on
the concrete licenses for all works in question.
the concrete type of work and way of combining it with your work.
if you plan to go conform with the licensing or you want to exploit it.
You have not specified much of both, so no better suggestion can be given. Also take note that IANAL and this is only some personal opinion of a layman.
And do not wait until someone does something. You should be the active party to find out. That works best by contacting the original author of that component, tell her what you want to do with it and keep the written allowance you get from her with your records. Especially as you are unsure. And the original author has enough power to allow you things even apart from the public visible license btw..
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This is a point that has always confused me about open source software. Normally, I write everything from scratch. What I'm trying to find out is what licenses allows me to do this?
Stay away from the GPL (LGPL is okay) and you won't have any problems. If you want to include GPLed packages in your application, things get tricky. BSD and MIT style licenses will get you the fewest obligations. In general, find the software package you want to use and read the license. They're usually pretty straightforward about what is and is not acceptable to do.
Why would you want to do more work? Of course you should. All you have to do is redistribute the OS technology source with your app (I am not a lawyer, but thats how I understand it).
The assumes
1) You are talking about an established open source solution, like hibernate, that you can reasonably assume works well.
2) The product you are developing is not using the open source technology as the 'secret sauce' that is going to make you money. Else you might have to open source that special part of your app.
If the software actually fits what you're trying to do, then yes it does cut down on development time. If the software mostly fits what you're trying to do you may end up spending more time trying to work with it rather than solving the problem it's meant to solve.
I am not a lawyer, so be sure to run a license past legal council if in doubt
As far as licensing goes, there are a number of licenses that allow you to incorporate the software into your commercial application. Most of the time as long as the license isn't a Copyleft type license (i.e. GPL) you can distribute the software as is. If you have to make changes that get distributed with your application, some licenses will requires the source also be distributed with it and an indication of what's different from the core project.
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My company (EU-based) is considering to release some parts of our code
under a free software license. We are going to ask lawyers, but firstly
I'd like to ask what problems should we expect when doing that? We are
planning to use LGPL license, mostly because we want to be able to reuse
other people's code in our (closed) software later too.
Edit: We own all the code we want to be released (everything was written
by a single developer, and he actually proposed to opensource the code).
Also we don't care about reusing
this code by our competitors; this piece of code is more or less orthogonal
to what we do for living. We do expect that this code will be improved by others (or at
least spot any bugs), but it is actually good enough for us already.
Thanks for opinions.
Possible problems:
You do not own the rights on all of your own code (e.g. some portion was made by a freelancer but the rights were never properly transfered)
You expect something to happen with your code (e.g. other people to improve it) but it never happens
Your code becomes used in a competing product and you cannot prevent that
You want to withdraw the freedom and find out you can't
If your company wants to keep some control of what is the official code, I suggest you the Artistic License 2.0, instead of LGPL.
I would recommended releasing under LGPL or BSD style license, which does not contain any responsibilities from your side.
Regarding the use of code by other people, again, use only BDS licensed code and you are all set.
If you use the LGPL, contributions from other people can still be done under the GPL, which would prevent you from reusing their code in close-source software. You'll have to watch out for that. Also, even if their contribution is LGPLed, you only have the freedom to not open the source if that code is used in an external DLL or the like.
This is a very rough description, and the implications of that are quite hard to grasp (I don't fully either) and also depend on what kind of software you're developing, so you definitively have to consult a lawyer.
You might also want to look at what Qt does.
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I am currently working as a consultant but i found that i have not been doing coding for a very long time.
So i wonder if there are any other nice websites beside sourceforge.net which can allows me to do some coding.
Thanks
sourceforge.net - All sorts of open source software, from Linux to BSD to Windows.
codeplex.com - Mainly Microsoft technologies-focused. This is where you'll find more of the .NET open source stuff.
For general indexes to open source software, see freshmeat and Ohloh. The former is a classic index of open source software and the latter has statistics about the source code for each project, which might be handy if you want to judge how active a project is.
If you want to join easily, distributed revision control is nice. The big hosting sites for Mercurial (Bitbucket), Git (Github) and Bazaar (Launchpad) should give you plenty of projects to browse and, hopefully, contribute to :-)
OpenHatch (openhatch.org) is nifty (IMO) because:
The site provides a number of "bite size" bugs from Free Open Source Software (FOSS) projects.
There is a Map showing the registered users in your area, along with the langauges and projects they are involved in.
The site provides an email forwarding address with rotating "anti-spam salt" by which other contributors may reach out to contact you. (You may choose whether to use this, or provide an alternate means to contact you on the site.)
Also, there's Github and Google Code
Google Code.
IMO, much nicer than SourceForge.
How about Google Summer of Code?
If you're just looking for a small quick project, Clusterify.
Ohloh is an other good collection of open source projects.
It provide details, timeline and notes.
There's lots of under served open source sectors that you can give your extra time to.
You don't have to do what everyone else is doing, take for example, the loads of time wasting CMS projects out there, while there seems to be no proper OCR in Java, and Jira is a great issue tracking system, no doubt, but its not open source, Bugzilla sucks, don't say Mantis, and Eventum is written in PHP(I'm a Java fanatic)
The best source for open source projects is of course sourceforge.net, Google code, not so much.
We can not say that one website is better, it depends on the domain you work, so your best friend is well http://www.google.com with your keywords
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For quite a while, I thought that Free Software was Open Source Software. I've found out that this view is incorrect, and that Open Source Software is not necessarily Free Software. I honestly can't see any differences.
What am I missing here? What are the distinguishing traits of both parties?
Both are basically the same, except the free software movement puts more emphasis on the freedom to modify and redistribute the code. For example, GNU GPL would be more "free" than MIT licence, because MIT license does not enforce copyleft and thus someone can develop closed-source software based on the code.
See also Wikipedia chapter about this, which mentions Microsoft shared source inititive, that can provide you with very unfree source code of their applications.
Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social
movement.
- Richard Stallman
The GNU project answers this question directly:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html
The essential difference, slightly oversimplified, is that Free Software generally requires that, if you modify and/or incorporate it into another body of work, the entire result must also be distributed as Free Software, and you are forbidden to further restrict the ability of any "downstream" users from modifying, using, or redistributing the software with the same rights that were given to you.
Disclaimer: Dammit, Jim, I'm a developer, not a lawyer. Don't construe any terms or comments as "legal advice."
Open source definition:
http://opensource.org/docs/osd
Free software defintion:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Both are talking about free-as-in-speech. FSF is "more free" in that for software to meet the FSF standards, it must afford more freedoms to its users. The OSI standards are looser, "free" software is "open" but the reverse isn't necessarily true - It turns out even this isn't always true.
They are functionally the same in the vast majority of cases. It's a philosophical difference - FSF wants intellectual freedom, OSI wants practical freedom to (re)use and adapt software.
It is pretty simple to understand.
Free source in the sense: Which is free with free laws applicable once you modify it also should also be shared to world with same laws! And its code if any can also be all of us!
Open source in the sense: We can see the actual application for our daily usage, but cannot use it as it is ours means that we cannot modify its code since it is copyrighted to the distributor!
For more info: "Difference between free and open source"
Freeware software is just small software which are free but their codes are not accessible.It can be downloaded ,used ,copied without restrictions.
Shareware software are just a demo version of the full software developed by small software company and the modification and other usability lies with the development group.Here end user dependencies is more.
Open source software are just software developed often by large vendors which are re distribuable ,used and modifiable with out any restrictions.Here codes of the software are fully accessed by the user for future modification and making of large software.
Free means the user has freedom to run,copy, study,distribute,change and improve the software. And the open source is different to that.