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FOSS stands for "Free and Open Source Software". There is no one universally agreed-upon definition of FOSS software and various groups maintain approved lists of licenses. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is one such organization keeping a list of open-source licenses. [1] The Free Software Foundation (FSF) maintains a list of what it ...
The Version 2 of the GNU General Public License [14] of 1991 also says that patents convert free software to proprietary software: "Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program ...
Free and open-source software licenses have been successfully enforced in civil court since the mid-2000s. [85] In a pair of early lawsuits—Jacobsen v. Katzer in the United States and Welte v. Sitecom in Germany—defendants argued that open-source licenses were invalid. [86] [87] Sitecom and Katzer separately argued that the licenses were ...
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 7 December 2024. Software licensed to ensure source code usage rights Open-source software shares similarities with free software and is part of the broader term free and open-source software. For broader coverage of this topic, see open-source-software movement. It has been suggested that this article ...
The group Open Source Initiative (OSI) defines and maintains a list of approved open-source licenses. OSI agrees with FSF on all widely used free-software licenses, but differ from FSF's list, as it approves against the Open Source Definition rather than the Free Software Definition. It considers Free Software Permissive license group to be a ...
The Open Source Initiative defines a permissive software license as a "non-copyleft license that guarantees the freedoms to use, modify and redistribute". [6] GitHub's choosealicense website describes the permissive MIT license as "[letting] people do anything they want with your code as long as they provide attribution back to you and don't hold you liable."
When initially released, the license did not include the term "and/or", which was changed from "and" by ISC in 2007. [12]Paul Vixie stated on the BIND mailing list that the ISC license started using the term "and/or" to avoid controversy similar to the events surrounding the University of Washington's refusal to allow distribution of the Pine email software. [12]
Licenses which only permit non-commercial redistribution or modification of the source code for personal use only are generally not considered as open-source licenses. However, open-source licenses may have some restrictions, particularly regarding the expression of respect to the origin of software, such as a requirement to preserve the name ...