this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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Asklemmy
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Sure. Very briefly. These are all open source licenses which (roughly) means the source is freely viewable and changeable. But the specific differences are:
MIT/BSD - Anyone can take the code and do whatever they want, if they start with your code, improve it then make it proprietary there is nothing you can do.
GPL - If someone makes changes to your code and improves it they have to make it available for use by the community too IF and only if they distribute the binary.
AGPL - Like GPL except that even if they are running the code on their server and not sharing it they still have to give back improvements.
MPL 2.0 - Like GPL but limited to specific files. This is useful for things like statically linked code. I don’t often recommend this but it can be needed for static only code bases like rust. Proprietary software can link with this and not be covered by the copyleft share alike stuff.
LGPL - Like the GPL but for dynamically linked libraries. Proprietary software can link with this and not be covered by the copyleft share alike stuff.
SSPL - Like AGPL but technically even more intense. If you use SSPL you must open source all the tooling you use to manage that hosted SSPL license. Any tools to make sure the SSPL software is running well or to set it up must also be open sourced.
The OSI technically does not say the SSPL is “open source” but given that they recently admitted that they regret defining the AGPL as open source I think the OSI might be showing a bit of corporate bias.
Thank you. At glance it seems like the difference between CC0 and CC-SA in copyright with some additiona rules about what exactly count as "publishing" stuf. That was very helpful.
CC0 vs CC-SA is actually a really good (rough) analogy.