The concept of free and open source software gave rise to another retronym definition: “proprietary software,” any software that isn’t open source. Open source software licenses All the rights and responsibilities involved in open source software are established by the licenses under which the...
If you’ve ever installed a software application, then you’ve been asked to agree to an end-user license. That long and complex document is normally there to protect the rights of the software company. The GPL is different. Unlike many other software licenses, the GPL isn’t trying to ...
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First of all: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. In case of doubt, please refer to the actual text of the licenses I am talking about, and to your legal counselor. All open-source software, according to the Open Source Initiative, is distributed under a license that gi...
Open Source Licenses At the time of this writing, there are 58 licenses recognized as “Open Source” by the Open Source Initiative[6]. Since this is a book about the use of open source software and not a book about the intricacies of software licensing, we briefly discuss the most common...
Every open source package uses one (or more) license and there are more than100 different OSI licenses Approved. These licenses can be divided into 2 main groups: Permissive Copyleft Permissive– as the name suggests, the licenses that fall under this group provide more freedom to use, copy,...
Get the lowdown on the BSD 3-Clause open source software license, including key requirements and how it compares to other BSD license variants.
Open source software licenses fall into two categories: permissive and copyleft. Copyleft licenses, in turn, come in two flavors: strong and weak. The Mozilla Public License 2.0 is in the latter group. The difference between the two forms of copyleft licenses lies in the scope of source code...
When open source software is released under the Apache License 2.0, developers can use the licensed software forever, anywhere, without purchase costs or royalties; and they can redistribute variations on the code under different licenses. These rights cannot be withdrawn, though there are excep...
Some managers have to turn to yet another piece of software just to manage the license of other software they’ve installed. With open-source software, for example Linux distributions Debian and Ubuntu, or Apache web server and MariaDB database server, there are no licenses to purchase or ...