Open source licensing for the group projects

Later this autumn we'll have a lecture on open source licenses, but I want to give a quick intro about the topic already because of the group projects. 

 

Open source licenses come in different flavours, and one of the most important features is something called copyleft. Copyleft is used as a term to describe how 'viral' the license is. 

 

GPL has strong copyleft, which means that if you use components with GPL inside your source code, all your code must be released as GPL.

 

LGPL has weak copyleft, which means that if you use an LGPL library inside your code (given various conditions), you don't have to open source your own code, but you have publish any changes you did to the component itself.

 

Licenses without copyleft can be used freely and do not restrict you so much, and are therefore 'safer' to use without taking into consideration the license requirements. These are licenses such as Apache, BSD and MIT. They have various copyright and marketing clauses, but none that limit how you distribute your code. There are various license compatibility issues however. 

 

Anyway, the bottom line is that in your projects you are allowed to use third party open source components, but you should not use those that have copyleft, like GPL, AGPL or LGPL. BSD, Apache, MIT and a few others are fine. 

 

Your group project should be licensed with the GPL license.