I occasionally use open source software for my projects, and they usually come with some sort of licensing conditions (GPL, LGPL, MIT, etc). To be honest, I never read the docs and I'm not really sure what the distinction are.
Can someone or someones post a very concise definition & distinction between them?
LGPL: GPL except some restricted forms of closed-source use are OK. I believe the idea is that you can use an LGPL library in a closed-source project. Really, both the GPL and LGPL are way too confusing.
MIT: Do basically whatever you want. Just don't claim you wrote it, and don't try to sue anybody.
BSD: Essentially equivalent to MIT.
Microsoft Public License: Essentially equivalent to MIT.
Apache License: Essentially MIT, but you have to make sure people know that you modified the code (if in fact you did).
Academic Free License: Basically MIT but with more legal jargon and more protection (from patent suits, for example).
Really, other than GPL and LGPL, most open source licenses are easy to read and quite clear in what they allow. I would urge you to read them.