Appendix A. Software Licenses

Many of the licenses governing the software discussed in this book are novel in the sense that they afford the end user many freedoms that proprietary software does not. The idea of these licenses is to offer other parties the opportunities to improve and innovate upon previous designs. The following five licenses have all been developed in that spirit.

The following sections are facsimiles of these licenses for the reader’s evaluation. In no way does any material herein constitute legal advice of these licenses, and users of software governed by these licenses should seek their own counsel. For a comprehensive list of open source licenses the nonprofit Open Source Initiative (OSI) certifies software under the OSI Certified Software program.