Understanding the top four OSS licenses

OSS is copyrighted and there are restrictions around it, they just tend to be much less strict than the IP laws that were so much more common before the turn of the century. There is a good chance that, at some point, you have heard terms such as MIT licenses, GPL, and others. While these might just sound like legal speak no one cares about, there is a huge need to become familiar with things at a high level for the following reasons:

• If you put something in your company's code base that is sold, you might have to make that software open source.
• Your personal project might be something you would rather be kept secret or proprietary.
• You might want to make money off your project in the future.

You should keep these in mind as you are making the decision to use certain packages as once you are using those tools in your software, the only choice you will have in the future to not be held to those licenses' restrictions...