Software Licenses

What is software licenses?

A software license is a licensing agreement that gives an individual, company, or organization permission to use the software. For example, in most cases, it is illegal to acquire one copy of a program and copy it across multiple computers. Instead of requiring dozens, hundreds, or thousands of licensed copies of a program individually, companies often buy licenses for sites that scale according to the number of installed users.

Types of Licenses

1. Free Software Licenses - A free software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software broad rights to modify and redistribute that software. Free software licenses apply to software in source code as well as in binary object code form as copyright law recognizes both forms.
2. Public Domain Licenses -
   An Equivalent Public Domain License refers to licenses that grant rights similar to the public domain or/and act as waivers. They are used to ensure that copyrighted works can be used by anyone unconditionally while avoiding the complexities of attribution or license compatibility that arise with other licenses. However, the concept of the public domain cannot be defined or defined differently in different countries, so the use of this license can certainly risk.
3. Permissive Licenses - Permissive licenses are also known as “Apache-style” or “BSD style.” They contain minimal requirements about how the software can be modified or redistributed. This type of software license is perhaps the most popular license used with free and open-source software. Aside from the Apache License and the BSD License, another common variant is the MIT License.
4. LGPL — Short for Lesser General Public License, a license accompanying some open source software that details how the software and its accompanying source code may be freely copied, redistributed, and modified. The Lesser General Public License is used for unlicensed software so that it can be included in both free and nonfree software, and is often referred to as the GPL. The LGPL and the GPL differ in one important exception; with the LGPL, the requirement that you open-source your own software extensions has been removed. The most common use of the LGPL is in the GNU LGPL. The LGPL is also referred to as the GNU Libraries and formally the GPL Library.
5. Permissive Software License - Permissive licenses are also known as “Apache-style” or “BSD style”. They contain the minimum requirements for how the software can be modified or redistributed. This type of software license is perhaps the most popular license used for free and open-source software. Besides the Apache license and BSD license, another common option is the MIT license.
6. Copyleft Licenses -Copyleft, a license giving general permission to copy and reproduce intellectual property. Where copyright protects the public interest in invention and creativity by providing individual incentives through copyright control, copyleft protects social interests in knowledge creation by transferring control of the copyright to the wider community. The concept of copyleft is central to many software projects, and the license is most commonly used for software, digital art, written works, and other creative content. Copyleft is a special license granted under copyright law, and international copyright laws are the mechanisms that establish and protect copyleft. Typically, copyleft is a general licensing agreement provided by the copyright holder that allows anyone to freely use copyrighted property, but subject to certain conditions. For example, copyleft software allows users to run, modify, copy, and distribute the software, provided the source code remains open and publicly available. Such software usually must be transferred under a copyleft license that requires successive users to accept and transfer copyleft and requires that any modifications or enhancements to the copyleft software also be copyleft.
7. Proprietary Licenses - Of all the types of software licenses, this is the most restrictive. The idea is that all rights are reserved. It is usually used for proprietary software whose work cannot be modified or redistributed. Examples of proprietary software include Microsoft Windows, Adobe Flash Player, PS3 OS, iTunes, Adobe Photoshop, Google Earth, macOS (formerly Mac OS X and OS X), Skype, WinRAR, Oracle’s version of Java and some versions of Unix.