Permissive Open Source License Comparison - Apache, MIT and BSD
Permissive licenses is a type of open source licenses which guarantee the freedom to use, modify and distribute the licensed work with very little restrictions. Unlike those copyleft licenses, permissive licenses allow users to use the work for their proprietary derivative works for commercial or private use. Based on the research, the most popular permissive licenses are MIT and Apache 2.0, followed by BSD in the third place. This video will provide some details for these licenses.
MIT license is one of the most popular permissive licenses in the world. Its term is very short and simple. You can use MIT code to do anything in your project as long as you include the original license somewhere in your project as a means to give credit to the original author. A good practice for that is to include a LICENSE file in your project, put some lines mentioning that your project is using MIT code from the author, followed by the original license text.
Compared with MIT, the Apache license is another type of permissive license. It has multiple versions and the latest one is version 2.0. The Apache license has a few restrictions, and some of the famous ones include the following. If the original code includes a NOTICE file, the derivative works must also include the NOTICE file. If the original code has been modified, you must make it clear that the file has been changed. The Apache license also contains a patent license and retaliation clause which is designed to prevent potential lawsuits. To put it simply, Apache licenses allow others to use the code freely, but do not want to get involved in lawsuits for patent infringes. If you do issue a lawsuit alleging patent infringes, then you will automatically lose the grant to that patent. This is where the retaliation is coming from.
Another popular permissive open source license is the BSD license and there are different versions of BSD licenses containing different numbers of clauses, namely, 2 clauses, 3 clauses and 4 clauses. There is also a zero-clause BSD license which is identical to a public domain license. The 2-clause BSD License is very similar to the MIT license. The 3-clause BSD includes a non-endorsement clause which disallows names of the copyright holder and contributors to be used for promotion of derived products. Compared with the 3-clause BSD license, the 4-clause BSD license added an "advertising" clause which required all advertisements to acknowledge the authorship of UCLA Berkeley and its contributors.
Attribution:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
https://pixabay.com/photos/woman-entr...