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The concrete effect of strong vs. weak copyleft has yet to be tested in court. [26] Free-software licenses that use "weak" copyleft include the GNU Lesser General Public License and the Mozilla Public License. The GNU General Public License is an example of a license implementing strong copyleft.
[74] [32] They are called strong copyleft in contrast to the weaker copyleft licenses often used by corporations. Weak copyleft uses narrower, explicit definitions of derivative works. [75] [35] The MPL uses a file-based definition, the CPL and EPL use a module-based definition, and the FSF's own LGPL refers to software libraries. [76]
The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird. [9] The MPL is developed and maintained by Mozilla, [10] which seeks to balance the concerns of both open-source and proprietary developers.
The strength of the copyleft governing a work is an expression of the extent that the copyleft provisions can be efficiently imposed on all kinds of derived works. "Weak copyleft" refers to licenses where not all derived works inherit the copyleft license; whether a derived work inherits or not often depends on the manner in which it was derived.
Derived from the Mozilla Public License 1.1, [4] the CDDL tries to address some of the problems of the MPL. [5] Like the MPL, the CDDL is a weak copyleft license in-between GPL license and BSD/MIT permissive licenses, requiring only source code files under CDDL to remain under CDDL.
Permissive licenses can be used within copyleft works, but copyleft material cannot be released under a permissive license. Some weak copyleft licenses can be used under the GPL and are said to be GPL-compatible. GPL software can only be used under the GPL or AGPL. [62]
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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.