Software Licensing
A software license is a document that provides legally binding guidelines for the use and distribution of software.
Software licenses typically provide end users with the right to one or more copies of the software without violating copyrights. The license also defines the responsibilities of the parties entering into the license agreement and may impose restrictions on how the software can be used. Software licensing terms and conditions usually include fair use of the software, the limitations of liability, warranties and disclaimers and protections if the software or its use infringes on the intellectual property rights of others.
Software licenses typically are either proprietary, free or open source, the distinguishing feature being the terms under which users may redistribute or copy the software for future development or use.
Software licensing types
- GNU/GPL General Public License
The first type of software license which we will cover here is known as the GNU GPL, or simply the GPL license. This General Public License is the most widely used type of free software license, and was originally created for the GNU Project by Richard Stallman. The GNU project is a huge project of a mass collaboration of free software which was announced on September 27, 1983. In this announcement, the goal of the project was stated to be to develop, “a sufficient body of free software ….to get along without any software that is not free.” As Wikipedia explains, Stallman set out to create one license which could be used for any project, which would make it impossible for several projects to share the same code.
This type of licensing soon became known as General Public Licensing or GPL. It is the first copyleft license which was created for use by the public.
The derived works from this type of licensing can only be distributed if it is done so under the same license terms as the original.
This allows the end user of the program to retain the rights of the free software definition while using copyleft to make sure that the freedoms of the license are protected even if the work is modified.
The terms and conditions which come with the GPL must be expressed clearly to anyone who receives a copy of the work for which a GPL is attached. If a licensee agrees to these terms and conditions, he or she may be given permission to modify the work, copy it, or distribute it or any modified version. This may be done either as a free service or for a fee, in accordance with copyleft laws. Copyleft is basically just as it sounds. It is the opposite of a copyright which restricts the recipient of software. Copyleft grants right to the recipient, and makes sure that those rights cannot be taken away from them.
2. End-user license agreement
An end-user license agreement (EULA) is a legal contract entered into between a software developer or vendor and the user of the software, often where the software has been purchased by the user from an intermediary such as a retailer. A EULA specifies in detail the rights and restrictions which apply to the use of the software.
Many form contracts are only contained in digital form, and only presented to a user as a click-through which the user must “accept”. As the user may not see the agreement until after he or she has already purchased the software, these documents may be contracts of adhesion.
Some end-user license agreements accompany shrink-wrapped software that is presented to a user sometimes on paper or more usually electronically, during the installation procedure. The user has the choice of accepting or rejecting the agreement. The installation of the software is conditional to the user clicking a button labelled “accept”.
3. Free software License
A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder (usually the author) of a piece of software can remove these restrictions by accompanying the software with a software license which grants the recipient these rights. Software using such a license is free software (or free and open-source software) as conferred by the copyright holder. Free-software licenses are applied to software in source code and also binary object-code form, as the copyright law recognizes both forms.
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4.Permissive Software License
A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license with only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, usually including a warranty disclaimer. Examples include the GNU All-permissive License, MIT License, BSD licenses, Apple Public Source License and Apache license. As of 2016, the most popular free-software license is the permissive MIT license.
MIT Software Licensing
The MIT Software Licensing gets its name from the fact that it was created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is known as a permissive free software license, which means that it permits the recipient to reuse the software if all of the copies of the licensed software come with a copy of the original terms of the MIT License. This proprietary software may incorporate software under the MIT License, but it retains its proprietary nature. The license was written for the X Window System, but has also been used in Expat, PuTTY, the Mono Development Platform class libraries, CakePHP, Ruby on Rails, Symfony, and Lua.
Wikipedia shares the following as a sample of the MIT License agreement:
Copyright (C) <year> <copyright holders>Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sub-license, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
In a nutshell, you can use a MIT-licensed software in your own projects and resell it. You are not obliged to publicly share the source code of your product.
The Apache 2.0 License
The Apache 2.0 license is a permissive free software license by the Apache Software Foundation. The 2.0 version requires preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer. It also allows the user of the software the freedom to use the software for any purpose, modify it, and distribute the modified versions of the software, under the terms of the license, without concern for royalties.
The BSD License
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. The original version has since been revised, and its descendants are referred to as modified BSD licenses.
BSD is both a license and a class of license (generally referred to as BSD-like). The modified BSD license (in wide use today) is very similar to the license originally used for the BSD version of Unix. The BSD license is a simple license that merely requires that all code retain the BSD license notice if redistributed in source code format, or reproduce the notice if redistributed in binary format. The BSD license (unlike some other licenses) does not require that source code be distributed at all.
Public-domain-equivalent license
Public-domain-equivalent license are licenses that grant public-domain-like rights and/or act as waivers. They are used to make copyrighted works usable by anyone without conditions, while avoiding the complexities of attribution or license compatibility that occur with other licenses.
No permission or license is required for a work truly in the public domain, such as one with an expired copyright; such a work may be copied at will. Public domain equivalent licenses exist because some legal jurisdictions do not provide for authors to voluntarily place their work in the public domain, but do allow them to grant arbitrarily broad rights in the work to the public.
Zero / public domain
Besides copyright licenses, Creative Commons also offers CC0, a tool for relinquishing copyright and releasing material into the public domain. CC0 is a legal tool for waiving as many rights as legally possible.Or, when not legally possible, CC0 acts as fallback as public domain equivalent license.Development of CC0 began in 2007 and was released in 2009. A major target of the license was the scientific data community.
