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Comment by rmc | Hacker News Reader

Any open source software (gpl3, gpl2, bsd licence, mit licence etc etc) cannot be distributed in a commercial or noncommercial manner without also providing the source code. (there are some other requirements aswell as this, notably with GPL that your software must be GPL licensed aswell.).

There is nothing special in any open source/free software licence about commercial vs noncommercial use. All OS/FS treat commercial and noncommercial the same.

As for requiring source code distribution, the GPL 3 is essentially the same as the GPL2 (which is ~20 years old), you have to do it under gpl2 and you have to do it under gpl3.

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The MIT and BSD licenses do allow distribution inside of commercial software without providing source code. The only real restrictions are that the MIT license requires you to include their copyright notice somewhere and the BSD license is similar.

I believe the ZLIB license also permits commercial distribution.

Off the top of my head it's only the GPL licenses that require source distribution no matter what.

False. The whole point of the bsd license is that you are not required to make source available, but that if you do that you need to preserve the bsd notices about the copyright of the orIginal code. I'm over simplifying slightly but gpl is the one with the mandatory code resharing. MIT and bsd do not have that

I might be a bit wrong here, esp. with BSD. :P Mea cupla.

I know that BSD, unlike GPL, does not require that derived code be BSD licenced. And when I was talking about "source code" I was thinking of the original code (not the derived work), but I was wrong about BSD not requiring that you provide the source. Many big users of BSD code (e.g. Apple) provide the BSD source code they use, so I thought it was required.

However, for GPL, "commerical" vs. "noncommercial" is irrelevant.

What? No. You can distribute binaries you compiled from open source code that is licensed under the MIT or BSD licenses, in both commercial and noncommercial contexts. Read the license text, they only require you to include the license with your distribution. Not the source code or any of your modifications.

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