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The Open Source Initiative defines a permissive software license as a "non-copyleft license that guarantees the freedoms to use, modify and redistribute". [6] GitHub's choosealicense website describes the permissive MIT license as "[letting] people do anything they want with your code as long as they provide attribution back to you and don't hold you liable."
The strength of the copyleft license governing a work is determined by the extent to which its provisions can be imposed on all kinds of derivative works. Thus, the term "weak copyleft" refers to licenses where not all derivative works inherit the copyleft license; whether a derivative work inherits or not often depends on how it was derived.
License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program.
[15] [16] Permissive licenses come from academia. [17] Copyleft licenses come from the free software movement. [18] Copyleft licenses require derivative works to be distributed with the source code and under a similar license. [15] [16] Since the mid-2000s, courts in multiple countries have upheld the terms of both types of license. [19]
The most popular open source licenses as of 2022 are the Apache License (permissive), the MIT License (permissive), and the GPL (copyleft). If software is in the public domain, the owner's copyright has been extinguished and anyone may use the work with no copyright restrictions. [1]
FOSS stands for "Free and Open Source Software". There is no one universally agreed-upon definition of FOSS software and various groups maintain approved lists of licenses. . The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is one such organization keeping a list of open-source licenses.
The Free Software Foundation prefers copyleft (share-alike) free-software licensing rather than permissive free-software licensing for most purposes. Its list distinguishes between free-software licenses that are compatible or incompatible with the FSF's copyleft GNU General Public License .
Conversely, a permissive license may provide an incentive to create non-free software by reducing the cost of developing restricted software. Since this is incompatible with the spirit of software freedom, many people consider permissive licenses to be less free than copyleft licenses. [35]