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FOSS stands for "Free and Open Source Software". There is no one universally agreed-upon definition of FOSS software and various groups maintain approved lists of licenses. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is one such organization keeping a list of open-source licenses. [1] The Free Software Foundation (FSF) maintains a list of what it ...
This is a list of free and open-source software packages, computer software licensed under free software licenses and open-source licenses. Software that fits the Free Software Definition may be more appropriately called free software; the GNU project in particular objects to their works being referred to as open-source. [1]
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 ...
Free and open-source software licenses have been successfully enforced in civil court since the mid-2000s. [85] In a pair of early lawsuits—Jacobsen v. Katzer in the United States and Welte v. Sitecom in Germany—defendants argued that open-source licenses were invalid. [86] [87] Sitecom and Katzer separately argued that the licenses were ...
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 group Open Source Initiative (OSI) defines and maintains a list of approved open-source licenses. OSI agrees with FSF on all widely used free-software licenses, but differ from FSF's list, as it approves against the Open Source Definition rather than the Free Software Definition. It considers Free Software Permissive license group to be a ...
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."
The BSD license is a simple license that merely requires that all code retain the BSD license notice if redistributed in source code format, or reproduce the notice if redistributed in binary format. The BSD license (unlike some other licenses e.g. GPL) does not require that source code be distributed at all.