Licensing

VistA is a collaborative community. In many open source communities, the question of how to make money from open source software often arises.

That the software source code is open to examination (the original literal meaning of "open source") is a different issue that the ones that surround the ability to redistribute that code. The latter is really an ownership of the code and permission-to-use issue.

Most software is made up of modules, and VistA is no different. There are more than 100 separate modules, and many subroutines that can be added and changed.

The combinations of these modules determines the "flavor" of the distribution of the software platform. (That is why there are several versions of VistA.) One distribution may include proprietary modules that cannot be used in any other package, and one distribution may only contain freely exchangeable modules. (In the VistA community there are examples of this.)

Here are some commonly used licenses for software that have attempted to grapple with these issues.

Other resources

• Ubuntuguide's brief intro to licenses