This is a case study of TeX, a typesetting software that was developed by Donald E. Knuth in the late 70's. Released with an open source license, it has become a reference in scientific publishing. TeX is now used to typeset and publish much of the world's scientific literature in physics and...

This paper examines the choice of license terms along the development of a piece of software. Three licenses are compared, the proprietary one, the Berkeley Software Distribution, and the General Public License. The choice of one or the other license depends on the characteristics of the...