Originally posted by Campbell Ritchie:
GNU?
The
GPL is certainly not the least restrictive open source license. The most characteristic restriction of the GPL is that if you derive something from a GPL-licensed piece of software, you must license your derived work under the GPL too.
Public domain means: I give up all rights to this work, you can do whatever you want to it. So I guess that would be the least restrictive license possible.
Another way of licensing that might be interesting is the
Creative Commons family of licenses. These licenses allow you to control various restrictions as you want.
Here's a
comparison of free software licenses.