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The following table compares various features of each license and is a general guide to the terms and conditions of each license, based on seven subjects or categories. Recent tools like the European Commissions' Joinup Licensing Assistant, [ 10 ] makes possible the licenses selection and comparison based on more than 40 subjects or categories ...
The Open Source Initiative defines a permissive software license as a "non-copyleft license that guarantees the freedoms to use, modify and redistribute". [6] GitHub's choosealicense website describes the permissive MIT license as "[letting] people do anything they want with your code as long as they provide attribution back to you and don't hold you liable."
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.
Initially titled Microsoft Permissive License, it was renamed to Microsoft Public License while being reviewed for approval by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). [10] The license was approved on October 12, 2007, along with the Ms-RL. [11] According to the Free Software Foundation, it is a free software license but not compatible with the GNU ...
A GitHub study in 2015 on their statistical data found that the MIT license was the most prominent FOSS license on that platform. [ 38 ] In June 2016 an analysis of the Fedora Project 's packages showed as most used licenses the GPL family, followed by MIT, BSD, the LGP family, Artistic (for Perl packages), LPPL (for texlive packages), and ASL.
For example, Netscape drafted their own copyleft terms after rejecting permissive licenses for the Mozilla project. [32] The GPL remains the most popular license of this type, but there are other significant examples. The FSF has crafted the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) for libraries.
An early example of an open-source project that did successfully re-license for license compatibility reasons is the Mozilla project and their Firefox browser. The source code of Netscape's Communicator 4.0 browser was originally released in 1998 under the Netscape Public License/Mozilla Public License [6] but was criticised by the FSF and OSI for being incompatible.
The license was confirmed as a GPL-compatible free software license by the Free Software Foundation, but its use is "not recommended". [1] In 2009, the Open Source Initiative chose not to approve the license as an open-source license due to redundancy with the Fair License. [2] The WTFPL version 2 is an accepted Copyfree license. [14]