Jeff Atwood writes a great summary of Open Source Licenses. As far as I’m concerned, there’s really only four software licenses to worry about (open source or otherwise). Proprietary - The code is mine! You can’t look at it. You can’t reverse engineer it. Mine Mine Mine! GPL - You can do whatever you want with the code, but if you distribute the code or binaries, you must make your changes open via the GPL license. New BSD - Use at your own risk. Do whatever the hell you want with the code, just keep the license...
UPDATE: I could not slip the subtle beg for an MSDN subscription I surreptitiously embedded in this post past my astute readers. Many thanks to James Avery for contributing an MSDN subscription to this grateful developer. Now that I have my MSDN subscription, I say this whole VPC licensing thing is a non-issue and quit whining about it. (I joke, I joke!). In a recent post I declared that Virtual PC is a suitable answer to the lack of backwards compatibility support for Visual Studio.NET 2003. In the comments to that post Ryan Smith asks a great question surrounding the licensing issues involved. ...