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The strength of the copyleft license governing a work is determined by the extent to which its provisions can be imposed on all kinds of derivative works. Thus, the term "weak copyleft" refers to licenses where not all derivative works inherit the copyleft license; whether a derivative work inherits or not often depends on how it was derived.
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.
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.
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 Copyleft sticker from an envelope Don Hopkins mailed to Richard Stallman in 1984. Copyleft licenses require source code to be distributed with software and require the source code to be made available under a similar license. [34] [60] Like the permissive licenses, most copyleft licenses require attribution. [61]
[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]
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 .
In this scenario, one option is a proprietary software license, which allows the possibility of creating proprietary applications derived from it, while the other license is a copyleft free software/open-source license, thus requiring any derived work to be released under the same license. The copyright holder of the software then typically ...