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The Open Source Initiative defines a permissive software license as a "non-copyleft license that guarantees the freedoms to use, modify and redistribute". [6] GitHub's choosealicense website describes the permissive MIT license as "[letting] people do anything they want with your code as long as they provide attribution back to you and don't hold you liable."
Copyleft is a distinguishing feature of some free software licenses, while other free-software licenses are not copyleft licenses because they do not require the licensee to distribute derivative works under the same license. There is an ongoing debate as to which class of license provides the greater degree of freedom.
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 ...
The two main categories of open-source licenses are permissive and copyleft. Both grant permission to change and distribute software. Typically, they require attribution and disclaim liability. Permissive licenses come from academia. Copyleft licenses come from the free software movement.
BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD license was used for its namesake, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system ...
Copyleft is a type of free license that mandates derivative works to be licensed. The other types of free license lack this requirement: for permissive licenses, attribution is typically the only requirement, and public-domain-equivalent licenses have no restrictions.
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.
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 .