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The concrete effect of strong vs. weak copyleft has yet to be tested in court. [26] Free-software licenses that use "weak" copyleft include the GNU Lesser General Public License and the Mozilla Public License. The GNU General Public License is an example of a license implementing strong copyleft.
Copyleft licenses (also known as "share-alike"), [46] require source code to be distributed with software and require the source code be made available under a similar license. [48] [49] Copyleft represents the farthest that reuse can be restricted while still being considered free software. [50]
For this reason some copyleft licenses are also known as reciprocal licenses, they have also been described as "viral" due to their self-perpetuating terms. [4] Under fair use, however, the copyleft license may be superseded, just like regular copyrights. Therefore, any person utilizing a copyleft-licensed source for their own work is free to ...
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.
Pages in category "Copyleft software licenses" The following 24 pages are in this category, out of 24 total. This list may not reflect recent changes. A.
The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL, or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or copyleft licenses, that guarantee end users the freedoms to run, study, share, and/or modify the software. [7] The GPL was the first copyleft license available for general use.
The strong copyleft GPL is written to prevent distribution within proprietary software. [115] [116] Weak copyleft licenses impose specific requirements on derivative works that may allow the covered code to be distributed within proprietary software in certain circumstances. [77]
Some licenses are called "copyleft" licenses. Essentially, they have three key properties: A work licensed with a copyleft license can be copied at will. All published derivative works must use exactly the same license as the original: if you use the work, you're forced to use the same license for your own original work as well.