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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 is software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modifying it, and—in some cases, as is the case with some patent-encumbered and EULA-bound software ...
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 ...
The BSD license family is one of the oldest and most broadly used license families in the free and open-source software ecosystem, and has been the inspiration for a number of other licenses. Many FOSS software projects use a BSD license, for instance the BSD OS family (FreeBSD etc.), Google's Bionic or Toybox.
Sometimes, the source code is released under a liberal software license at its end of life. This type of software can also have its source code leaked or reverse engineered. 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 ...
The Free Software Foundation maintains a rival set of criteria, the Free Software Definition. [21] Historically, these three organizations and their sets of criteria have been the notable authorities in determining whether a license covers free and open-source software. [22]
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 Design Science License (DSL) is a strong copyleft license that applies to any work, not only software or documentation, but also literature, artworks, music, photography, and video. DSL was written by Michael Stutz after he took an interest in applying GNU-style copyleft to non-software works, which later came to be called libre works .