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!)
The license for the standard Tcl distribution is
http://purl.org/tcl/home/software/tcltk/license_terms.html . In comp.lang.tcl the following summary of the Tcl license:
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.
escargo 19 May 2005 - This is not a simple breakdown, but it is a useful discussion of the issues [L1 ].
escargo 11 Apr 2006 - And here's a list of open source "approved" licenses: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/
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 ...
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.)