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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. [1] The Free Software Foundation (FSF) maintains a list of what it ...
Popular open source licenses include the Apache License, the MIT License, the GNU General Public License (GPL), the BSD Licenses, the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Open-source licenses are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified, and shared. They facilitate free and open-source ...
For information on software-related licences, see Comparison of free and open-source software licenses. A variety of free-content licences exist, some of them tailored to a specific purpose. Also listed are open-hardware licences, which may be used on design documents of and custom-made software for open-source hardware.
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 24 December 2024. Software licensed to ensure source code usage rights Open-source software shares similarities with free software and is part of the broader term free and open-source software. For broader coverage of this topic, see open-source-software movement. It has been suggested that this article ...
While the goals behind the terms are different, open-source licenses and free software licenses describe the same type of licenses. [13] The two main categories of free and open-source licenses are permissive and copyleft. [14] Both grant permission to change and distribute software. Typically, they require attribution and disclaim liability.
The Version 2 of the GNU General Public License [14] of 1991 also says that patents convert free software to proprietary software: "Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program ...
Free software and/or open-source software is also always source-available software, but not all source-available software is also free software and/or open-source software. This is because the official definitions of those terms require considerable additional rights as to what the user can do with the available source (including, typically ...
Licenses which only permit non-commercial redistribution or modification of the source code for personal use only are generally not considered as open-source licenses. However, open-source licenses may have some restrictions, particularly regarding the expression of respect to the origin of software, such as a requirement to preserve the name ...