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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.
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 ...
License proliferation is especially a problem when licenses have only limited or complicated license compatibility relationships with other licenses. Therefore, some consider compatibility with the widely used GNU General Public License (GPL) an important characteristic, for instance David A. Wheeler [2] [3] as also the Free Software Foundation (FSF), who maintains a list of the licenses that ...
Popular open source licenses include the Apache License, the MIT License, the GNU General Public License (GPL), the BSD Licenses, the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Open-source licenses are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified, and shared. They facilitate free and open-source ...
The proliferation of open-source licenses has compounded license compatibility issues, but all share some features: allowing redistribution and derivative works under the same license, unrestricted access to the source code, and nondiscrimination between different uses—in particular, allowing commercial use.
An early example of an open-source project that did successfully re-license for license compatibility reasons is the Mozilla project and their Firefox browser. The source code of Netscape's Communicator 4.0 browser was originally released in 1998 under the Netscape Public License/Mozilla Public License [6] but was criticised by the FSF and OSI for being incompatible.
In 2005, open source software advocate Eric S. Raymond questioned the relevance of GPL then for the FOSS ecosystem, stating: "We don't need the GPL anymore. It's based on the belief that open source software is weak and needs to be protected. Open source would be succeeding faster if the GPL didn't make lots of people nervous about adopting it."
This is a version of the Microsoft Public License in which rights are only granted to developers of Microsoft Windows-based software. [17] This license is not open source, as defined by the OSI, because the restriction limiting use of the software to Windows violates the stipulation that open-source licenses must be technology-neutral. [18]