This book navigates the maze of open source and free software licensing available to software developers who are interested in releasing their software but want to retain certain rights. As the book's authors note, open source licensing is often described as "radical," but it is based upon a solid legal tradition, including principles of copyright and how contractual provisions can modify those rights. Starting with the basic principles of copyright law, the book moves quickly into an overview of contract law, and touches on one of the reasons open source software has developed:
In general, under the American copyright system an effective monopoly is vested in the creator of each work, subject to relatively few limitations. However, for a number of reasons, most of them having to do with the substantial costs of developing and distributing work in a mass-market medium, rights held under copyright are rarely enforced by the work's creator and very little, if any, of hte benefit of the copyright goes to that person. Rather, because of the negotiation of contracts by publishers with the creator or through the doctrine of work for hire, the benefits of copyright flow to the corporations that distribute the work, not the people who create it.
The "fundamental purpose" of open source licensing is to deny anyone the exclusive right to "exploit" a work, and open source licensing is intended to further the distribution of a work, most notably software. The result is that open source products allow others to produce "derivative works" - in other words, to modify the program to make changes or improvements, thus (at least theoretically) spurring innovation. The book examines the differences in a variety of license types, from the MIT, BSD, Apache, and Academic Free Licenses to the GPL, LGPL, and Mozilla license and more. It answers questions about rights (as in, "what rights am I, the developer, giving up?") and what future users or developers can do with the software. Licensing can be a dense legal forest, as it were, but this book attempts to go step by step through each of the various licenses to explain differences in both application and philosophy. For anyone considering developing an open source or free software project, this book would be a valuable resource.
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