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Aladdin Free Public License
The Aladdin Free Public License, abbreviated AFPL, is a license written by L. Peter Deutsch for his Ghostscript PostScript language interpreter. History The license was derived from the GNU General Public License, but differs on two key points: * The source code must be included with any software distribution. * The software may not be sold, including any fees involved with distribution. Deutsch chose to include a commercial restriction in the AFPL based on his observation of people including Ghostscript in commercial products without full license compliance. Recent versions of Ghostscript are not licensed under the AFPL. Despite the name, the Free Software Foundation does not consider the AFPL a free software license, neither the OSI consider it an open-source license, nor does it fall under the Copyfree Standard definition. The AFPL can be considered a source-available license. See also * Dual-licensing Multi-licensing is the practice of distributing software under tw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
GNU Affero General Public License
The GNU Affero General Public License (GNU AGPL) is a free, copyleft license published by the Free Software Foundation in November 2007, and based on the GNU General Public License, version 3 and the Affero General Public License. The Free Software Foundation has recommended that the GNU AGPLv3 be considered for any software that will commonly be run over a network.List of free-software licences on the FSF website "''We recommend that developers consider using the GNU AGPL for any software which will commonly be run over a network.''" The Free Software Foundation explains the need for the license in the case when a free program is run on a server: The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if yo ... |
Ghostscript
Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF) page description languages. Its main purposes are the rasterization or rendering of such page description language files, for the display or printing of document pages, and the conversion between PostScript and PDF files. Features Ghostscript can be used as a raster image processor (RIP) for raster computer printers—for instance, as an input filter of line printer daemon—or as the RIP engine behind PostScript and PDF viewers. It can also be used as a file format converter, such as PostScript to PDF converter. The ps2pdf conversion program comes with the Ghostscript distribution. Ghostscript can also serve as the back-end for PDF to raster image (png, tiff, jpeg, etc.) converter; this is often combined with a PostScript printer driver in "virtual printer" PDF creators. As it takes the form of a language interpreter, Ghostscript can also be used as a g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PostScript
PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Brotz, Ed Taft and Bill Paxton from 1982 to 1984. History The concepts of the PostScript language were seeded in 1976 by John Gaffney at Evans & Sutherland, a computer graphics company. At that time Gaffney and John Warnock were developing an interpreter for a large three-dimensional graphics database of New York Harbor. Concurrently, researchers at Xerox PARC had developed the first laser printer and had recognized the need for a standard means of defining page images. In 1975-76 Bob Sproull and William Newman developed the Press format, which was eventually used in the Xerox Star system to drive laser printers. But Press, a data format rather than a language, lacked flexibility, and PARC mounted the Interpress effort to create a succ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general use and was originally written by the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Richard Stallman, for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. These GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the GNU Lesser General Public License, Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely used permissive software licenses BSD licenses, BSD, MIT License, MIT, and Apache License, Apache. Historically, the GPL license family has been one of the most popular software licenses in the free and open ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Source Code
In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source code. The source code is often transformed by an assembler or compiler into binary machine code that can be executed by the computer. The machine code is then available for execution at a later time. Most application software is distributed in a form that includes only executable files. If the source code were included it would be useful to a user, programmer or a system administrator, any of whom might wish to study or modify the program. Alternatively, depending on the technology being used, source code may be interpreted and executed directly. Definitions Richard Stallman's definition, formulated in his 1989 seminal li ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft ("share alike") terms, such as with its own GNU General Public License. The FSF was incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, US, where it is also based. From its founding until the mid-1990s, FSF's funds were mostly used to employ software developers to write free software for the GNU Project. Since the mid-1990s, the FSF's employees and volunteers have mostly worked on legal and structural issues for the free software movement and the free software community. Consistent with its goals, the FSF aims to use only free software on its own computers. History The Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985 as a Nonprofit corporation, non-profit corporation supporting free software development. It continued existi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free Software Licence
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. Comparison Free-software licenses provide risk mitigation against different legal threats or behaviors that are seen as potentially harmful by developers: History Pre-1980s In the early times of software, sharing of software and source code was common in certain communities, for instance academic institutions. Before the US Com ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Open-source License
An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified and/or shared under defined terms and conditions. This allows end users and commercial companies to review and modify the source code, blueprint or design for their own customization, curiosity or troubleshooting needs. Open-source licensed software is mostly available free of charge, though this does not necessarily have to be the case. Licenses which only permit non-commercial redistribution or modification of the source code for personal use only are generally not considered as open-source licenses. However, open-source licenses may have some restrictions, particularly regarding the expression of respect to the origin of software, such as a requirement to preserve the name of the authors and a copyright statement within the code, or a requirement to redistribute the licensed software only under the same license (as in a copy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Copyfree
A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries 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. the most popular free-software license is the permissive MIT license. Example The following is the full text of the simple GNU All-permissive License: Definitions The Open Source Initiative defines a permissive software license as a "non-copyleft license that guarantees the freedoms to use, modify and redistribute". GitHub's ''choosealicense'' website describes the permissive MIT license as "ettingpeople do anything they want with your code as long as they provide attribution back to you and don’t hold you liable." California Western School of Law's newmediarights ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Source-available
Source-available software is software released through a source code distribution model that includes arrangements where the source can be viewed, and in some cases modified, but without necessarily meeting the criteria to be called open-source. The licenses associated with the offerings range from allowing code to be viewed for reference to allowing code to be modified and redistributed for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. Distinction from free and open-source software Any software is source-available software as long its source code is distributed along with it, even if the user has no legal rights to use, share, modify or even compile it. It is possible for a software to be both source-available software and proprietary software (For example: Id Software Doom). In contrast, the definitions of free software and open-source software are much narrower. Free software and/or open-source software is also always ''source-available software'', but not all source-avail ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dual-licensing
Multi-licensing is the practice of distributing software under two or more different sets of terms and conditions. This may mean multiple different software licenses or sets of licenses. Prefixes may be used to indicate the number of licenses used, e.g. dual-licensed for software licensed under two different licenses. When software is multi-licensed, recipients can typically choose the terms under which they want to use or distribute the software, but the simple presence of multiple licenses in a software package or library does not necessarily indicate that the recipient can freely choose one or the other. In some cases, especially when the software has multiple origins, ''all'' the accompanied licenses apply at the same time. The applicability of the different licenses has to be individually checked. The distributor may or may not apply a fee to either option. The two usual motivations for multi-licensing are license compatibility and market segregation based business model ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Software Licenses
A software license is a legal instrument (usually by way of contract law, with or without printed material) governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both source code and object code forms, unless that software was developed by the United States Government, in which case it cannot be copyrighted. Authors of copyrighted software can donate their software to the public domain, in which case it is also not covered by copyright and, as a result, cannot be licensed. A typical software license grants the licensee, typically an end-user, permission to use one or more copies of software in ways where such a use would otherwise potentially constitute copyright infringement of the software owner's exclusive rights under copyright. Software licenses and copyright law Most distributed software can be categorized according to its license type (see table). Two common categories for software under copyright la ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
