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The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL, or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or copyleft licenses, that guarantee end users the freedoms to run, study, share, or modify the software. [7] The GPL was the first copyleft license available for general use.
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.
FSF's free software and OSI's open-source licenses together are called FOSS licenses. There are licenses accepted by the OSI which are not free as per the Free Software Definition . The Open Source Definition allows for further restrictions like price, type of contribution and origin of the contribution, e.g. the case of the NASA Open Source ...
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. [77] Permissive licenses are broadly compatible because they can cover separate parts of a project. Multiple licenses including the GPL and Apache License have been revised to enhance compatibility. [80]
In such case, this License incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of this License. 9. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.
The GPL requires any derivative work to also be released according to the GPL while the BSD license does not. Essentially, the BSD license's only requirement is to acknowledge the original authors, and poses no restrictions on how the source code may be used. As a result, BSD code can be used in proprietary software that only acknowledges the ...
The most popular open source licenses as of 2022 are the Apache License (permissive), the MIT License (permissive), and the GPL (copyleft). If software is in the public domain , the owner's copyright has been extinguished and anyone may use the work with no copyright restrictions.
License proliferation is especially a problem when licenses have only limited or complicated license compatibility relationships with other licenses. Therefore, some consider compatibility with the widely used GNU General Public License (GPL) an important characteristic, for instance David A. Wheeler [2] [3] as also the Free Software Foundation (FSF), who maintains a list of the licenses that ...