In Order to Offer your Source Here

What this means is that the source code must meet the guidelines as given by the Open Source Organization and the Debian Free Software Guidelines. A quick summary of those guidelines appears here. In addition, we have a selection of ready-built licenses to choose from.

Licenses to Choose From

• Public Domain - This is where you tell the world they are free to do anything they want with the code. This is the form that is most free, and what I consider the highest goal. It basically means that there is no license.
• Chainware - This is my own version of Public Domain, but one that allows you to ship a license file and have a little fun. I wrote it after getting one too many chain letter emails, and used to attach an older version of it to free software I wrote for local BBS's back in the 80's and early 90's.
• BSD - This is a license that still provides wide use of the source code. Basically, it just says that your copyright license has to remain in place in the code.
• X Consortium - This license has a few more restrictions than the BSD license.
• MozPL - Originally the Netscape Public License, or NPL, which is used on the Netscape Communicator source code that has been released as Mozilla, the NPL out of necessity gave Netscape too many special privileges to be considered for general use. The Mozilla Public License is the more general version they are promoting.
• Artistic License - This is the license distributed with Perl.
• LGPL - The Free Software Foundation had a lot of problems originally with people who were afraid to use their wonderful GCC compiler for fear that the copyleft would taint their code. The Library Gnu Public License addresses some of these concerns.
• GPL - The license which is promoted by the Free Software Foundation. Personally I don't like it, and would encourage everyone to choose another license instead. But if the GPL is what you want to use, go ahead. Your code still qualifies to be included here.

Other summaries of licenses

What is required

To see exactly what was specified, take a look on the Debian web site. It spells everything out better than I can. As a summary, however, the points I consider important are as follows:

• No limitations on who can use your source code. You cannot make limitations based on the type of person nor on the type of use the code is put to. That may be hard for those who like to put a limitation on using their code for any military purpose, for example, but the rationale seems a good one and I will follow it, with the possible exception of the implicit limitations in the GPL, which I will allow.
• The source and binaries must both be freely redistributable. Free redistribution means that the license must allow people to both give it away and to sell it, so "free" is being used in the sense of "freedom" rather than "no cost". However, it also means "no cost" in that no royalty or fee can be charged by the author.
• Modifications must be allowed, and redistribution of the modifications must be allowed in some way, even if it is just as patch files.
• No additional licenses can be required. So no releasing an encryption algorithm and saying "By the way, you have to go buy a license from RSA before you can use this." That also means that you can't require the use of libraries that don't meet the open-source standard.
• Licenses must not contaminate other software. I think that the GPL blows this one terribly, and I'm not sure how to interpret this rule if the GPL is still considered to meet the guidelines. However, there are obvious areas where contamination will not be allowed, and apart from the GPL I will try to keep contamination to a minimum.

The second definition of open source comes from the Open Source Organization. They have written their Open Source Definition drawing heavily from the Debian guidelines. In fact, it is almost word for word, with some slight changes which I will list.

• An added feature is the ability to explore the rationale behind a particular rule. This can be particularly handy if the rule seems unreasonable to you and you want to see why it is included.
• Source code redistribution is explicitly not required with the binaries. However, the place to download a free copy must be offered, and there are further restrictions on the form of the source code. It must not be obfuscated, passed through a preprocessor, etc.