One of the things that had to be decided upon in the early stages of open source was the licensing scheme. The various licenses do not vary that much. The largest differences are in minute issues about redistribution, enhancements, and derivatives of the initial work. BSD (Berkeley Standard Distribution) style licensing is the oldest and least-restrictive. GPL (GNU Public License) is a more-recent and more restrictive licensing scheme that many programmers choose to use. There are many more licensing schemes in place created by programmers who wanted to tweak the restrictions just right for their software. As long as it falls under the OSD, it can be officially called open source (Release 1.0).

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