License proliferation was a problem largely supported by the OSI. IMHO there are...

dredmorbius · on June 13, 2015

There are a few other variants. Affero, as noted, also the Mozilla Public License, which applies on a file-by-file basis and allows for proprietary code to be integrated into a MozPL licensed work as a whole and distributed.

But otherwise, yes: GPL, LGPL, BSD/MIT are the principle cases.

the_why_of_y · on June 14, 2015

I'd prefer if people forget about BSD/MIT and use ALv2 instead, for the patent clauses.

With the following preferred licenses you'd get explicit patent clauses, in ascending order of copyleft-ness:

ALv2 MPLv2 LGPLv3 GPLv3 AGPLv3

Perhaps the Eclipse Public License would also be an alternative at the same level as MPLv2 but I'm not familiar with it.

dredmorbius · on June 15, 2015

Fair point.

ALv2 == Apache License, v2.

ArtB · on June 13, 2015

Don't forget the AGPL.

reitanqild · on June 13, 2015

GPL is just a subset of AGPL, isn't it?