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The strength of the copyleft license governing a work is determined by the extent to which its provisions can be imposed on all kinds of derivative works. Thus, the term "weak copyleft" refers to licenses where not all derivative works inherit the copyleft license; whether a derivative work inherits or not often depends on how it was derived.
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.
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.
The OSI recommends a mix of permissive and copyleft licenses, the Apache License 2.0, 2- & 3-clause BSD license, GPL, LGPL, MIT license, MPL 2.0, CDDL and EPL. License and version FSF approval
The most popular open source licenses as of 2022 are the Apache License (permissive), the MIT License (permissive), and the GPL (copyleft). If software is in the public domain, the owner's copyright has been extinguished and anyone may use the work with no copyright restrictions. [1]
The Copyleft sticker from an envelope Don Hopkins mailed to Richard Stallman in 1984. Copyleft licenses require source code to be distributed with software and require the source code to be made available under a similar license. [34] [60] Like the permissive licenses, most copyleft licenses require attribution. [61]
The Apache License version 2.0 [3] is a similarly permissive license that includes an explicit contributor's patent license. Of specific relevance to US jurisdictions, the MIT license uses the terms "sell" and "use" that are also used in defining the rights of a patent holder in Title 35 of the United States Code section 154.
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. [15] [16] Permissive licenses come from academia. [17] Copyleft licenses come from the free software movement. [18]