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The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own (even proprietary) software without being required by the terms of a strong copyleft license to release the source code of their own components.
While version 2.1 of the LGPL was a standalone licence, the current LGPL version 3 is based on a reference to the GPL.. Compared to the GNU Classpath license above, the LGPL formulates more requirements to the linking exception: licensees must allow modification of the portions of the library they use and reverse engineering (of their software and the library) for debugging such modifications.
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.
Private use - whether modification to the code must be shared with the community or may be used privately (e.g. internal use by a corporation) Sublicensing - whether modified code may be licensed under a different license (for example a copyright ) or must retain the same license under which it was provided
The version numbers diverged in 1999 when version 2.1 of the LGPL was released, which renamed it the GNU Lesser General Public License to reflect its place in the philosophy. The GPLv2 was also modified to refer to the new name of the LGPL, but its version number remained the same, resulting in the original GPLv2 not being recognised by the ...
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 FreeBSD project argues on the advantages of BSD-style licenses for companies and commercial use-cases due to their license compatibility with proprietary licenses and general flexibility, stating that the BSD-style licenses place only "minimal restrictions on future behavior" and are not "legal time-bombs", unlike copyleft licenses. [27]
[note 2] The Unlicense software license, published around 2010, offers a public-domain waiver text with a fall-back public-domain-like license, inspired by permissive licenses but without an attribution clause. [12] [13] In 2015 GitHub reported that approximately 102,000 of their 5.1 million licensed projects, or 2%, use the Unlicense. [note 3]