Free software: Difference between revisions

Jump to navigation Jump to search

Free software (view source)

Revision as of 17:38, 23 October 2009

79 bytes removed ,  23 October 2009
→‎Free software licenses
 
The majority of free software uses a small set of licenses. The most popular of these licenses are:
* the [[GNU General Public License]]
* the [[GNU Lesser General Public License]]
* the [[BSD License]]
* the [[Mozilla Public License]]
* the [[MIT License]]
* the [[Apache License]]
 
The Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative both publish lists of licenses that they find to comply with their own definitions of free software and open-source software respectively.
The FSF list is not prescriptive: free licensees can exist which the FSF has not heard about, or considered important enough to write about. So it's possible for a license to be free and not in the FSF list. However, the OSI list is prescriptive: they only list licenses that have been submitted, considered and approved. This formal process of approval is what defines a license as Open Source. Thus, it's not possible for a license to be Open Source and not on the OSI approved list.
 
Apart from these two organizations, the [[Debian]] project is seen by some to provide useful advice on whether particular licenses comply with their [[Debian Free Software Guidelines]]. Debian doesn't publish a list of ''approved'' licenses, so its judgments have to be tracked by checking what software they have allowed into their software archives. That is summarized at the Debian web site.
 
It is rare that a license is announced as being in-compliance by either FSF or OSI guidelines and not vice versa (the [[Netscape Public License]] used for early versions of Mozilla being an exception, as well as the [[NASAASA Open Source Agreement]]).
 
=== Permissive and copyleft licenses ===
The FSF categorizes licenses in the following ways:
* [[Public domain]] software – the copyright has expired, the work was not copyrighted or the author has released the software onto the public domain. Since public-domain software lacks copyright protection, it may be freely incorporated into any work, whether proprietary or free.
* [[permissive free software licences|Permissive licenses]], also called BSD-style because they are applied to much of the software distributed with the [[Berkeley Software Distribution|BSD]] operating systems. The author retains copyright solely to disclaim warranty and require proper attribution of modified works, and permits redistribution and '''any''' modification, even proprietary ones.
* [[Copyleft]] licenses, the [[GNU General Public License|GPL]] being the most prominent. The author retains copyright and permits redistribution and modification provided all such redistribution is licensed under the same license. Additions and modifications by others must also be licensed under the same "copyleft" license whenever they are distributed with part of the original licensed product.
 
== Security and reliability ==
Valarauca
51

edits

Retrieved from "https://lug.mtu.edu/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/5652"

Navigation menu