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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 .
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. An even stronger copyleft license is the AGPL, which requires the publishing of the source code for software as a service use cases.
A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, [1] is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, usually including a warranty disclaimer.
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. [15] [16] Permissive licenses come from academia. [17] Copyleft licenses come from the free software movement. [18]
Copyleft is a type of free license that mandates derivative works to be licensed. The other types of free license lack this requirement: for permissive licenses, attribution is typically the only requirement, and public-domain-equivalent licenses have no restrictions.
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.
Due to their restrictions on distribution, not everyone considers copyleft licenses to be free. [34] 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 ...
The most well known free software license that uses strong copyleft is the GNU General Public License. Free software licenses that use "weak" copyleft include the GNU Lesser General Public License and the Mozilla Public License. Examples of non-copyleft free software licenses include the X11 license, Apache license and the BSD licenses.