Tom Callaway of Fedora explains some of the intricacies of licensing and ensuring that a software package included in Fedora and Red Hat is actually verified to be open source. He provides an overview of the various open source licenses, including the MIT, BSD, GPL, LGPL, and Apache licenses, plus the public domain and many more. He mentioned that Red Hat/Fedora tracks more than 180 valid open source licenses--more than the Free Software Foundation or Open Source Initiative does. He cites problems with the Artistic 1.0 License and shows how holes in that license almost caused it to be invalid. He urges developers to pick an existing license rather than writing their own, especially if they do not feel it necessary to contact a lawyer while doing so.

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