List of software licenses

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In computing, software that is copyrighted and licensed under a software license is done under a variety of licensing schemes. For end-users there are proprietary licenses and there are free software licenses. Within these schemes are further classifications. There are also different licensing schemes for access to and use of source code. To address special intellectual property issues regarding source code, Open Source licenses and special copyright schemes, such as copyleft, have been created.

Not all software is licensed, or even copyrighted, and this article is thus not an exhaustive list of the terms under which software is available. Software may be published without an accompanying license, as License-Free Software, in which case it remains copyrighted, its distribution is subject to ordinary copyright law, and its sale is subject to ordinary sales law. Software may also be released to the public domain, in which case it is not copyrighted and the notion of a copyright license simply does not apply at all (although the other parts of a software licence, including warranty provisions, will still apply to the sale of such software).

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[edit] Open source / free software licenses

The terms "Open source licenses", and "free software licenses" are usually interchangeable. There are minor differences, but these occur only in fringe areas. In general, for a license to be considered "open source", it is approved by Open Source Initiative, and for a license to be "free software", it should be approved by Free Software Foundation.

[edit] Free software licenses

[edit] GPL 2 compatible

The GNU General Public License is a popular license, with offerings including Linux, such that it is useful to know if the license chosen is compatible with it. Knowing compatibility is important if a developer wants to avail him- or herself of the wide GPL software 'commons'.

[edit] GPL 2 incompatible

The GPL has certain special requirements that make code under licenses incompatible (that is, cannot be consequently licensed) under the GPL.

[edit] Non-free software license

  • Microsoft Reference License

[edit] Commercial Royalty-Free

A form of licensing where typically a development version of the product is for a fee but the deployment of applications built or assembled with or using the product do not incur an additional fee.

[edit] Free Licensed Closed Source

  • Free Solaris Binary License
  • Free For non commercial Use
    • Can be used for free by a party if the goal does not involve commercial gain. If it is used for commercial gain, payment is required. If it is used for charity/personal objectives payment is not required.

[edit] Pay Licensed Viewable Source

  • Microsoft's Shared Source

[edit] Pay Licensed Closed Source

  • Microsoft Windows' EULA

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Free Software Foundation. "A Quick Guide to GPLv3". Licenses. Free Software Foundation. http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html#new-compatible-licenses. 
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