I had the thought it would be useful to offer a quick and simple breakdown of the more popular licenses for those who don't speak legalese.  Ideally the format should be to list a license name, and a simple, unopinonated, breakdown of what the license states. (The short version!)

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The so called '''BSD''' license for the standard Tcl distribution can be read here:

http://purl.org/tcl/home/software/tcltk/license_terms.html
.
In comp.lang.tcl the following summary of the Tcl license was presented:

 In even simpler language:

   Paragraph 1. It's ours.
   Paragraph 2. You can use it, modify it, give it away, or sell it. But 
                only if you tell people about these terms.
   Paragraph 3. Don't sue us if it doesn't work.
   Paragraph 4. We don't have to fix it, either.
   Paragraph 5. Even if the Government uses it, we can use it
                ourselves, give it away, or sell it.


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''[escargo] 19 May 2005'' - This is not a simple breakdown, but it is a useful
discussion of the issues [http://www.devx.com/opensource/Article/27171].

''[escargo] 11 Apr 2006'' - And here's a list of open source "approved" licenses: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/
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I am aware of the document linked below, however it does not provide simple breakdowns of all the common licenses one might wish to use. It did have a nice summary of the TCL/TK license, so I copied it here hoping to start the ball rolling.

See [license] ...
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''[escargo] 24 May 2005'' - Licenses, like many other kinds of policies, are usually
reactions to some kind of problem.  I think it might be useful to try to determine
what problems different licenses are trying to solve, and then compare the different
problems.  (For example, I would say the Gnu Public License is trying to solve the
problem of people using code to create products from available code without making
the changes available.)

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''[ajb] 24 May 2005'' - Take a look at [http://freshmeat.net/faq/view/48/#828]

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