Licenses for Dummies

[Bill Moseley <moseley@hank.org>]

I figure there's people here that can help point me to good resources.

I've read LGPL and GPL and the "why not use LGPL" page[1].  Still, I'm not that clear in
simple terms what is allowed.  And also how BSD or Apache or Artistic compare.

Can someone point me to a good page for explaining the licenses -- other than to the 
actual licenses.

Specifically, this is for swish-e, which is a search engine.  The swish-e source is built 
into a C library, and also into a binary program "swish-e" that is a small front-end to the 
library.  Currently it's all GPL.

People have been asking for different licensing -- I guess they want to include a search 
engine in their proprietary products.  For some it's just a matter of providing a search to 
their included documentation.  For others it's perhaps more integrated with their product.

I'm not clear if there's a difference if they have their program run the swish-e binary vs. 
linking directly with the swish-e C library.  I frankly don't see any difference there.

I'm also not clear if their use of Swish-e (linked with libswish-e or just running the 
binary swish-e) effects their software's license.   GPL talks about "derivative" works which 
I'm not sure how to define.

I don't want to start a big debate about the details of the licenses.  I'm more interested,
in simple terms, in the major differences in them, and what general restrictions and rights
they provide to the developers and users.


Thanks,

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-not-lgpl.html

-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley@hank.org