Software Licenses

Copyright

A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself.

## Copyright Notice In the United States, the copyright notice consists of: - "©" or the word "Copyright" or abbreviation "Copr."; - the year of first publication of the copyrighted work; and - identification of the owner of the copyright, either by name, abbreviation, or other designation by which they are generally known. For example, for a work first published in 2011: © 2011 John Doe

Bern Convention

Under the Berne Convention, which most countries have signed, an author automatically obtains the exclusive copyright to anything they have written, and local law may similarly grant copyright, patent, or trademark rights by default.

## Copyright License A copyright license gives a person or entity (“licensee") the authorization to use a work from the copyright owner, usually in exchange for payment. Copyright licenses may be exclusive or nonexclusive, and the rights that come with them vary according to the specifics of each license.

Derivative work

A derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of an original, previously created first work (the underlying work).

Types of Software Licenses

Credit: Snyk.io

## Public Domain The public domain consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable.

## Public Domain 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.

## Unlicense The Unlicense is a public domain equivalent license with a focus on an anti-copyright message. ```text This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain. Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means. ```

## WTFPL ```text DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, December 2004 Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long as the name is changed. DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION 0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO. ```

## CC0 CC0 is a legal tool for waiving as many rights as legally possible.

## Publicly Available vs Public Domain Material that is available to the public via the Internet or other means **is not public domain** simply by reason of its being publicly available.

## Creative Commons Licenses The Creative Commons copyright licenses provide everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative work.

## CC BY - Attribution ![Logo](https://licensebuttons.net/l/by/3.0/88x31.png) This license lets others distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.

## CC BY-SA - Attribution-ShareAlike ![Logo](https://licensebuttons.net/l/by-sa/3.0/88x31.png) This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

## CC BY-ND - Attribution-NoDerivs ![Logo](https://licensebuttons.net/l/by-nd/3.0/88x31.png) This license lets others reuse the work for any purpose, including commercially; however, it cannot be shared with others in adapted form, and credit must be provided to you.

## CC BY-ND - Attribution-NonCommercial ![Logo](https://licensebuttons.net/l/by-nc/3.0/88x31.png) This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Aaron Shwartz

![Aaron Shwartz](assets/Aaron_Swartz_profile.jpg)

American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. - RSS - Markdown - Creative Commons - Reddit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

## Permissive Open Source Licenses A permissive open source license is a non-copyleft open source license that guarantees the freedom to use, modify, and redistribute, while also permitting proprietary derivative works.

## MIT License The MIT License, which bears the name of the famous university where it originated, is perhaps the most used open source license in the world, perhaps because it is very short and clear and easy to understand. It allows anyone to do whatever they wish with the original code, as long as the original copyright and license notice is included either in the distributed source code or software. It removes any liability from authors and does not explicitly contain a patent grant.

## Apache License The Apache License requires license notifications and copyrights on the distributed code and/or as a notice in the software. However, derivative works, larger projects, or modifications are allowed to carry different licensing terms when distributed and are not required to provide source code. Apache licenses contain a patent grant.

## BSD License License is another permissive open source license that preserves license notices and copyrights but allows larger or licensed works to be distributed without source code and under different license terms. The 2- clause BSD License is very similar to the MIT open source license, while the 3-clause and 4-clause BSD licenses add more requirements or restrictions related to reuse and other terms.

## Unlicense As its name indicates, this is the least restrictive of open source licenses because it amounts to making the open source open to the public domain. No conditions apply, meaning these unlicensed works can be distributed without source code and under different terms.

Free Software

The Free Software Definition written by Richard Stallman and published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) defines the following freedoms:

![Richard Stallman](assets/Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019.jpg)

**Freedom 0** - the freedom to use the work **Freedom 1** - the freedom to study the work **Freedom 2** - the freedom to copy and share the work with others **Freedom 3** - the freedom to modify the work, and the freedom to distribute modified and therefore derivative works

## Gratis versus Libre The English adjective free is commonly used in one of two meanings: "at no monetary cost" (gratis) and "with little or no restriction" (libre). ![Free Beer](assets/Isummit_2008,_Japan,_free_beer_crop.png) Richard Stallman summarized the difference in a slogan: "Think free as in free speech, not free beer."

## Reciprocity Anyone can benefit freely from the previous work of others, but that any modifications to that work should benefit everyone else as well, and thus must be released under similar terms.

## Copyleft Software Licenses Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works.

## GPL The GNU General Public License (GPL) preserves license notifications and copyright terms and is suitable for commercial, patent, and private use. Any software that uses GPL code must distribute all its source code under the same license. So if you use GPL code in your software (e.g., by using a GPL library), and distribute your application, all your source code must be made available under the same GPL license. This restriction makes the GPL a strong copyleft license.

## LGPL LGPL is for library routines. If someone modifies your LGPL library code, the LGPL behaves pretty much like the GPL, but if someone writes software that merely uses your library, the LGPL doesn't impose source release on the program that calls upon your code. This can broaden the potential uses of a library.

## AGPL The Affero GPL (AGPL) only adds only one clause, but an important one for some software. Because the GPL license is only triggered when software is distributed, there is a loophole for software that is made available over the network only, i.e., not explicitly “distributed”. The AGPL license closes this loophole by including a remote network interaction clause that triggers the GPL license for any software used over a network.

## SSPL The Server Side Public License (SSPL) - GPL + A company that offers a publicly available MongoDB as a service must release the software it uses to offer such service under the terms of the SSPL, including the management software, user interfaces, application program interfaces, automation software, monitoring software, backup software, storage software and hosting software, all such that a user could run an instance of the service using the source code made available. This license is now used for other well known products like ElasticSearch and Redis.

## Proprietary software licenses Provide no authority for code modification or reuse and normally provide software with operational code only, and no source code. A proprietary software license often includes terms that prohibit “reverse engineering” of the object code with the intention of obtaining source code by the licensee.

## Multi-licensing Multi-licensing is commonly done to support free software business models in a commercial environment. In this scenario, one option is a proprietary software license, which allows the possibility of creating proprietary applications derived from it, while the other license is a copyleft free software/open-source license, thus requiring any derived work to be released under the same license.

## References - https://snyk.io/learn/what-is-a-software-license/ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work - https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/what-is-a-copyright-license - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses - https://www.mongodb.com/licensing/server-side-public-license/faq

## License **[CC BY-SA - Attribution-ShareAlike](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)** - https://github.com/mstijak/software-licenses