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The concrete effect of strong vs. weak copyleft has yet to be tested in court. [26] Free-software licenses that use "weak" copyleft include the GNU Lesser General Public License and the Mozilla Public License. The GNU General Public License is an example of a license implementing strong copyleft.
The OSI recommends a mix of permissive and copyleft licenses, the Apache License 2.0, 2- & 3-clause BSD license, GPL, LGPL, MIT license, MPL 2.0, CDDL and EPL. License and version FSF approval
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 Free Software Foundation prefers copyleft (share-alike) free-software licensing rather than permissive free-software licensing for most purposes. Its list distinguishes between free-software licenses that are compatible or incompatible with the FSF's copyleft GNU General Public License .
Open-source licenses are categorized as copyleft or permissive. [33] Copyleft licenses require derivative works to include source code under a similar license. Permissive licenses do not, and therefore the code can be used within proprietary software.
[15] [16] Permissive licenses come from academia. [17] Copyleft licenses come from the free software movement. [18] Copyleft licenses require derivative works to be distributed with the source code and under a similar license. [15] [16] Since the mid-2000s, courts in multiple countries have upheld the terms of both types of license. [19]
Permissive licenses can be used within copyleft works, but copyleft material cannot be released under a permissive license. Some weak copyleft licenses can be used under the GPL and are said to be GPL-compatible. GPL software can only be used under the GPL or AGPL. [62]
The licenses in the GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. 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.