Popular Open Source License Models Comparison
Choosing an open-source license for your projects could be critical for the business and team. Here I put the most popular open-source licenses together to help you make a better and easier decision for your next project.
The most popular open-source licenses come in two major flavors:
- Permissive: like MIT, BSD, Apache, etc. They have few limitations in distribution except a required NOTICE.
- Copyleft: like GPL families and Mozilla. They require the distributions to have the same terms and source code.
The following table is a comparison between the most popular open-source license models. I hope it could help with the decision of your next projects.
Popular Open Source License Models
| Rules | BSL 1.0 | MIT | Apache 2.0 | Mozilla 2.0 | LGPL v3 | GPL v3 | AGPL v3 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Permissions | Commercial use | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Modification | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Patent Use | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Private Use | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | |
| Conditions | SaaS is distribution | ⚠️ | ||||||
| Disclose Source | ⚠️ | ⚠️ | ⚠️ | ⚠️ | ||||
| Same License | ⚠️ | ⚠️ | ⚠️ | ⚠️ | ||||
| Same Change | ⚠️ | ⚠️ | ⚠️ | ⚠️ | ||||
| License Notice | ⚠️ | ⚠️ | ⚠️ | ⚠️ | ⚠️ | ⚠️ | ⚠️ | |
| Limitations | Liability | 🚫 | 🚫 | 🚫 | 🚫 | 🚫 | 🚫 | 🚫 |
| Warranty | 🚫 | 🚫 | 🚫 | 🚫 | 🚫 | 🚫 | 🚫 | |
| Trademark use | 🚫 | 🚫 | ||||||
| Examples | Boost | Rails | Swift | Servo | Quorum | Ansible | Grafana |
You can find all popular open source license under SPDX specification here: https://spdx.org/licenses/