Does anyone know a good n00bs guide to the different types of licenses that are out there for open source software?

I know there are a few different ones - GPL and BSD to name two??

I'm keen to know what restrictions and liabilities I have when using open source in a project I'm about to take on.

Generally I've found that doing searches like "GPL vs BSD" are good. Wikipedia also offer a simple comparison:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... e_licenses

In my last year we did a module based around Open Source and discussed many licenses. We used a book called "Open Source & Free Software Licensing" from O'Reilly, it is a tad terse but takes you through many licenses and explains each clause.

Notably you have the BSD/MIT/Apache/Academic licenses which are very forgiving and some are based more at academia. You then have less forgiving licenses such as the GPL, and also licenses such as the Artistic and Creative Commons licenses. The book also explains a typical closed source license.

Linux User may have some more to say, I seem to recall his dissertation was based around something similar...

Nope, nothing to say.

My dissertation was based on software but touched on proprietary licensing, not open source, sorry! There are numerous complaints about open-source licensing, particularly the GPL, freely available on Google. I'd point you in the direction of Finlay, if anyone knows about this sort of thing it's him.