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Diagram of software under various licenses according to the FSF and their The Free Software Definition: on the left side "free software", on the right side "proprietary software". On both sides, and therefore mostly orthogonal, "free download" . A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software.
Proprietary software vendors can prohibit the users from sharing the software with others. Another unique license is required for another party to use the software. In the case of proprietary software with source code available, the vendor may also prohibit customers from distributing their modifications to the source code.
This table lists for each license what organizations from the FOSS community have approved it – be it as a "free software" or as an "open source" license – , how those organizations categorize it, and the license compatibility between them for a combined or mixed derivative work. Organizations usually approve specific versions of software ...
While such software often later becomes open source software or public domain, other constructs and software licenses exist, for instance shared source or creative commons licenses. [1] [2] If the source code is given out without specified license or public domain waiver it has legally to be considered as still proprietary due to the Berne ...
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.
There are a wide variety of free software licenses that define how a program can be used, modified, and sold commercially (see GPL, LGPL, and BSD-type licenses). FOSS may also be funded through donations. A software philosophy that combines aspects of FOSS and proprietary software is open core software, or
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.
It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License, and even further distinct from the more widely used permissive software licenses such as BSD, MIT, and Apache. Historically, the GPL license family has been one of the most popular software licenses in the free and open-source software (FOSS) domain.