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The Design Science License (DSL) is a strong copyleft license that applies to any work, not only software or documentation, but also literature, artworks, music, photography, and video. DSL was written by Michael Stutz after he took an interest in applying GNU-style copyleft to non-software works, which later came to be called libre works. In ...
Software copyright is the application of copyright in law to machine-readable software. While many of the legal principles and policy debates concerning software copyright have close parallels in other domains of copyright law, there are a number of distinctive issues that arise with software.
Copyleft enables volunteer programmers and organizations to feel involved and contribute to software and feel confident any future derivatives will remain accessible to them, and that their contributions are part of a larger goal, like developing the kernel of an operating system (OS). Copylefting software makes clear the intent of never ...
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.
[48] [49] Copyleft represents the farthest that reuse can be restricted while still being considered free software. [50] Strong copyleft licenses, such as the GNU General Public License (GPL), allow for no reuse in proprietary software, while weak copyleft, such as the related GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), do allow reuse in some ...
Organizations usually approve specific versions of software licenses. For instance, a FSF approval means that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) considers a license to be free-software license. The FSF recommends at least "Compatible with GPL" and preferably copyleft.
Note: this category differs substantially from Category:Free and open-source software licenses in that it is not limited to software, and not all free software licenses are copyleft (some are permissive, like those of BSD and MIT).
Free software played a significant part in the development of the Internet, the World Wide Web and the infrastructure of dot-com companies. [57] [58] Free software allows users to cooperate in enhancing and refining the programs they use; free software is a pure public good rather than a private good.