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Diagram of software under various licenses according to the FSF and their The Free Software Definition: on the left side "free software", on the right side "proprietary software". On both sides, and therefore mostly orthogonal, "free download" . A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software.
FSF's free software and OSI's open-source licenses together are called FOSS licenses. There are licenses accepted by the OSI which are not free as per the Free Software Definition . The Open Source Definition allows for further restrictions like price, type of contribution and origin of the contribution, e.g. the case of the NASA Open Source ...
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.
Open-source licenses are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified, and shared. They facilitate free and open-source software (FOSS) development. Intellectual property (IP) laws restrict the modification and sharing of creative works. Free and open-source licenses use these existing legal structures for an inverse purpose.
A GNU license – Free software licenses which usually also incorporate copyleft to ensure any copied code remains free as in freedom. A common GNU license is the GNU General Public License (GPL). The specific version used should be specified. A BSD license – There are multiple, and the specific license should be specified wherever possible ...
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.
While the goals behind the terms are different, open-source licenses and free software licenses describe the same type of licenses. [13] 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.
List of FSF approved software licenses; List of OSI approved software licenses; The FSF list is not prescriptive: free-software licenses can exist that the FSF has not heard about, or considered important enough to write about. So it is possible for a license to be free and not in the FSF list.