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Identifying and using software licenses
Small Print
If you derive a program component from a GNU General Public License (GPL) software package, you are obligated to publish your software under the same GPL license. However, if the program is a combination of GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) code and your own work, you are allowed to distribute the result under a new, potentially proprietary license. You would have the same options if you derived your software from a Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD)-licensed package.
Although GPL, LGPL, and BSD are all free software licenses, they envisage very different types of use. To illustrate the fundamental differences in more detail, software licenses can be broken down into different categories.
Outside of the open source world, proprietary software licenses are the norm, and they rarely follow a standard. Besides the widespread commercial licenses, this category also includes shareware and freeware.
Categorical
Free and open source software licenses are defined by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) [1] and the Open Source Initiative (OSI) [2]. A distinction can essentially be made between copyleft, permissive, and public domain licenses.
Copyleft licenses [3] oblige the licensee to publish any adaptations of the software (derivatives) under the same license as the original work. This type of license, also known as a reciprocal license, is intended to prevent restrictions on the use of the software. The best-known copyleft license is undoubtedly the GPL; its copyleft is considered to be very strict, whereas that of the Mozilla Public License (MPL) is viewed as quite permissive. Because the licensors themselves are not bound by their own copyleft, they can publish new versions under a proprietary license or allow
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