What are the best liberal software licenses (i.e. non viral/GPL)?

Question

There are lots of difference software licenses. The GPL is pretty strict and aims to keep software "free". Many projects use more liberal license, e.g. that are more "business friendly".

• Are there any good resources for people to read to decide what is a good license to use?
• If you have released licensed software, what license(s) do you use and why?

Answer 1

http://www.opensource.org/

Look into MIT or BSD licenses.

edit: In addition, some projects are released under multiple licenses (see Qt), for example you may want to allow people to use your code unchanged in their products they sell (perhaps asking for licensing fees), but they can get the source code and use it in non-commercial endeavors; in return you would simply ask for any improvements back (GPL).

See also this discussion on slashdot (look for +5 Informative and Interesting posts).

Answer 2

This question is almost a duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28530/corporate-friendly-open-source-licenses

(Also, in addition to the MIT and new BSD licenses mentioned by Jared, the Apache license is being increasingly used as a "more modern" non-copyleft open source license.)

Answer 3

Your use of "liberal" in that question is ambiguous. Do you mean more liberal as in a license that gives more freedoms to the users to modify and distribute software? Or are you simply looking for a more proprietary- or closed-source-software-friendly commercial license in contrast to the GPL or other open-source licenses.