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The Design Science License (DSL) is a strong copyleft license that applies to any work, not only software or documentation, but also literature, artworks, music, photography, and video. DSL was written by Michael Stutz after he took an interest in applying GNU-style copyleft to non-software works, which later came to be called libre works. In ...
In this table, "permissive" means the software has minimal restrictions on how it can be used, modified, and redistributed, usually including a warranty disclaimer. "Copyleft" means the software requires that its source code be made publicly available and that all provisions in the license be preserved in derivative works.
Software copyright is the application of copyright in law to machine-readable software. While many of the legal principles and policy debates concerning software copyright have close parallels in other domains of copyright law, there are a number of distinctive issues that arise with software.
[48] [49] Copyleft represents the farthest that reuse can be restricted while still being considered free software. [50] Strong copyleft licenses, such as the GNU General Public License (GPL), allow for no reuse in proprietary software, while weak copyleft, such as the related GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), do allow reuse in some ...
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.
Copyleft enables volunteer programmers and organizations to feel involved and contribute to software and feel confident any future derivatives will remain accessible to them, and that their contributions are part of a larger goal, like developing the kernel of an operating system (OS). Copylefting software makes clear the intent of never ...
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.
Open core is a business model where developers release a core piece of software as open source and monetize a product containing it as proprietary software. [114] The strong copyleft GPL is written to prevent distribution within proprietary software.