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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 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.
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.
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
Permissive licenses can be used within copyleft works, but copyleft material cannot be released under a permissive license. Some weak copyleft licenses can be used under the GPL and are said to be GPL-compatible. GPL software can only be used under the GPL or AGPL. [62]
[15] [16] Permissive licenses come from academia. [17] Copyleft licenses come from the free software movement. [18] Copyleft licenses require derivative works to be distributed with the source code and under a similar license. [15] [16] Since the mid-2000s, courts in multiple countries have upheld the terms of both types of license. [19]
In this scenario, one option is a proprietary software license, which allows the possibility of creating proprietary applications derived from it, while the other license is a copyleft free software/open-source license, thus requiring any derived work to be released under the same license. The copyright holder of the software then typically ...
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.