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A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software. Since the 1970s, software copyright has been recognized in the United States. Despite the copyright being recognized, most companies prefer to sell licenses rather than copies of the software because it enables them to enforce stricter terms on redistribution.
The Free Software Foundation states that "Both public domain works and the lax license provided by the Unlicense are compatible with the GNU GPL." [1]Google does not allow its employees to contribute to projects under public domain equivalent licenses like the Unlicense (and CC0), while allowing contributions to 0BSD licensed and US government PD projects.
Examples of license-free software formerly included programs written by Daniel J. Bernstein, such as qmail, djbdns, daemontools, and ucspi-tcp. Bernstein held the copyright and distributed these works without license until 2007. [1] From December 28, 2007, onwards, he started placing his software in the public domain with an explicit waiver ...
This table lists for each license what organizations from the FOSS community have approved it – be it as a "free software" or as an "open source" license – , how those organizations categorize it, and the license compatibility between them for a combined or mixed derivative work. Organizations usually approve specific versions of software ...
These software license agreements are often labeled as end-user license agreements . Another impact of the decision was the rise of the shrink-wrap closed source business model, where before a source code driven software distribution schema dominated. [15] [17]
SLUC is a software license published in Spain in December 2006 to allow all but military use. The writers of the license maintain it is free software, but the Free Software Foundation says it is not free because it infringes the so-called "zero freedom" of the GPL, that is, the freedom to use the software for any purpose. [77]
Nevertheless, software licensed under licenses that do not meet the Free Software Definition cannot rightly be considered free software. Apart from these two organizations, the Debian project is seen by some to provide useful advice on whether particular licenses comply with their Debian Free Software Guidelines .
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.