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A lot of the licensing conditions of open source software revolve around distribution: limitations of what you can charge for, what you can do with the software in a charging situation, or ultimately, what sorts of systems you can plug the software into. For example, the GPL license, the new public license, will purport to limit what you can patent utilizing that software in your system. So, it’s really designed to be a restraint on taking something proprietary that’s already been in the public licensing world. Other ones require you to make copies of your source code available. Other ones require you to at least attribute, in all of your splash pages and any commercial product, where your license came from and which types of licenses you utilize in that software.
There’s a number of licenses that lock, meaning if you have a license A and license B together, they have conflicting terms which would then prevent your system from legally being distributed under both terms of the licenses. So you have an issue of license lock, as well. So, those are probably that top ones where they purport to change how you can distribute and value your intellectual property.
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Minneapolis patent attorney Mark Stignani discusses the typical licensing conditions of Open Source Software.