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Software copyright is the application of copyright in law to machine-readable software. While many of the legal principles and policy debates concerning software copyright have close parallels in other domains of copyright law, there are a number of distinctive issues that arise with software.
A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software. Since the 1970s, software copyright has been recognized in the United States. Despite the copyright being recognized, most companies prefer to sell licenses rather than copies of the software because it enables them to enforce stricter terms on redistribution.
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.
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 ...
Popular free and 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). Free software licenses, also known as open-source licenses, are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified ...
In the mid-1980s, the GNU project produced copyleft free-software licenses for each of its software packages. An early such license (the "GNU Emacs Copying Permission Notice") was used for GNU Emacs in 1985, [5] which was revised into the "GNU Emacs General Public License" in late 1985, and clarified in March 1987 and February 1988.
Free licenses are a popular subset of public copyright licenses. They include free and open source software licenses and free content licenses. To qualify as a libre license, a public copyright license must allow licensees to share and adapt the licensed work for any purpose, including commercial ones.
It and the official definitions of free software by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) essentially cover the same software licenses. [ 6 ] [ 23 ] Nevertheless, there is a values difference between the free software and open source movements: the former is more based on ethics and values, the latter on pragmatism.
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