[nycbug-talk] open source software and licenses

[Bob Ippolito]

Since the topic of licenses have come up a couple times on the list, at 
meetings, and on IRC, I thought it might be useful to do a little 
informal poll of what open source software is important to what you do, 
and what class of license it is under.  Here's some of mine that I use 
regularly and directly for commercial purposes (excluding a lot of 
dependencies that are "under the hood", such as glibc, etc.):

GPL or equivalent
- The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) <http://gcc.gnu.org/>
- GNU readline (a library) 
<http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html>
- Debian GNU/Linux <http://www.debian.org/>
- RedHat Linux <http://www.redhat.com/>
- VNC <http://www.realvnc.com/>
- exim <http://www.exim.org/>
- courier <http://www.courier-mta.org/>
- Trac <http://www.edgewall.com/trac/>
- Vim <http://www.vim.org>

LGPL
-  JExcelApi <http://www.andykhan.com/jexcelapi/>
- LAME <http://lame.sourceforge.net/>

MIT/BSD/Apache/PSF or equivalent
- Python <http://python.org>
- Twisted <http://twistedmatrix.com>
- PyObjC <http://pyobjc.sf.net/>
- py2app <http://undefined.org/python/#py2app>
- graphlib 
<http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/i/u/iua1/python/graphlib/html/>
- Pyrex <http://nz.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/python/Pyrex/>
- PIL <http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/>
- ctypes <http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/ctypes/>
- win32all <http://starship.python.net/crew/mhammond/>
- py2exe <http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/py2exe/>
- nevow <http://nevow.com/>
- PEAK <http://peak.telecommunity.com/>
- Subversion <http://subversion.tigris.org/>
- TortoiseSVN <http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/>
- OpenLDAP <http://www.openldap.org/>
- Apache <http://apache.org>
- PHP <http://www.php.net/>
- PostgreSQL <http://postgresql.org>
- SQLite <http://sqlite.org>
- Darwin <http://developer.apple.com/darwin/>
- DarwinPorts <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
- Tcl/Tk <http://tcl.activestate.com/>
- OpenBSD <http://www.openbsd.org/>

.. this is, of course, not a complete list, but merely what I could 
think of readily.  One thing that interests me about the list is that 
GPL projects far outnumber other licenses according to many sources 
(i.e. sourceforge), but the software that is useful to me has a much 
different distribution of licenses.  Part of that may be that there is 
much more "fragmentation" in the non-GNU licenses, even though many of 
them are of equivalent "class" (i.e. MIT, BSD, ...), but I haven't ran 
the numbers on that.

-bob