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The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own (even proprietary) software without being required by the terms of a strong copyleft license to release the source code of their own components.
The following table compares various features of each license and is a general guide to the terms and conditions of each license, based on seven subjects or categories. Recent tools like the European Commissions' Joinup Licensing Assistant, [ 10 ] makes possible the licenses selection and comparison based on more than 40 subjects or categories ...
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.
The GPL remains the most popular license of this type, but there are other significant examples. The FSF has crafted the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) for libraries. Mozilla uses the Mozilla Public License (MPL) for their releases, including Firefox. IBM drafted the Common Public License (CPL) and later adopted the Eclipse Public License ...
While version 2.1 of the LGPL was a standalone licence, the current LGPL version 3 is based on a reference to the GPL.. Compared to the GNU Classpath license above, the LGPL formulates more requirements to the linking exception: licensees must allow modification of the portions of the library they use and reverse engineering (of their software and the library) for debugging such modifications.
A GNU license – Free software licenses which usually also incorporate copyleft to ensure any copied code remains free as in freedom. A common GNU license is the GNU General Public License (GPL). The specific version used should be specified. A BSD license – There are multiple, and the specific license should be specified wherever possible ...
In the mid-1980s, the GNU project produced copyleft free-software licenses for each of its software packages. An early such license (the "GNU Emacs Copying Permission Notice") was used for GNU Emacs in 1985, [5] which was revised into the "GNU Emacs General Public License" in late 1985, and clarified in March 1987 and February 1988.
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.