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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.
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 ...
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.
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.
The BSD license family is one of the oldest and most broadly used license families in the free and open-source software ecosystem, and has been the inspiration for a number of other licenses. Many FOSS software projects use a BSD license, for instance the BSD OS family (FreeBSD etc.), Google's Bionic or Toybox.
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 17 January 2025. 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 ...
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.
A free license or open license is a license that allows copyrighted work to be reused, modified, and redistributed. These uses are normally prohibited by copyright , patent or other Intellectual property (IP) laws.