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Software License
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 software, 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 s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Contract Law
A contract is a legally enforceable agreement between two or more parties that creates, defines, and governs mutual rights and obligations between them. A contract typically involves the transfer of goods, services, money, or a promise to transfer any of those at a future date. In the event of a breach of contract, the injured party may seek judicial remedies such as damages or rescission. Contract law, the field of the law of obligations concerned with contracts, is based on the principle that agreements must be honoured. Contract law, like other areas of private law, varies between jurisdictions. The various systems of contract law can broadly be split between common law jurisdictions, civil law jurisdictions, and mixed law jurisdictions which combine elements of both common and civil law. Common law jurisdictions typically require contracts to include consideration in order to be valid, whereas civil and most mixed law jurisdictions solely require a meeting of the min ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
License Compatibility
License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are commonly deliberately incompatible with proprietary licenses, in order to prevent copyleft software from being re-licensed under a proprietary license, turning it into proprietary software. Many copyleft licenses explicitly allow relicensing under some other copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses are (with minor exceptions) compatible with everything, including proprietary licenses; there is thus no guarantee that all derived works will remain under a permissive license. De ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free And Open-source Software
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source code is openly shared so that people are encouraged to voluntarily improve the design of the software. This is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright licensing and the source code is usually hidden from the users. FOSS maintains the software user's civil liberty rights (see the Four Essential Freedoms, below). Other benefits of using FOSS can include decreased software costs, increased security and stability (especially in regard to malware), protecting privacy, education, and giving users more control over their own hardware. Free and open-source operating systems such as Linux and descendants of BSD are widely utilized today, powering millions of servers, desktops, smartphones (e.g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proprietary Software
Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modifying it, and—in some cases, as is the case with some patent-encumbered and EULA-bound software—from making use of the software on their own, thereby restricting his or her freedoms. It is often contrasted with open-source or free software. For this reason, it is also known as non-free software or closed-source software. Types Origin Until the late 1960s computers—large and expensive mainframe computers, machines in specially air-conditioned computer rooms—were usually leased to customers rather than sold. Service and all software available were usually supplied by manufacturers without separate charge until 1969. Computer ven ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States. Some jurisdictions require "fixing" copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is often shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders. These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution. Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered "territorial ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CC-BY-NC
A Creative Commons NonCommercial license (CC NC, CC BY-NC or NC license) is a Creative Commons license which a copyright holder can apply to their media to give public permission for anyone to reuse that media only for noncommercial activities. Creative Commons is an organization which develops a variety of public copyright licenses, and the "noncommercial" licenses are a subset of these. Unlike the CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA licenses, the CC BY-NC license is considered non-free. A challenge with using these licenses is determining what noncommercial use is. Defining "Noncommercial" In September 2009 Creative Commons published a report titled, "Defining 'Noncommercial'". The report featured survey data, analysis, and expert opinions on what "noncommercial" means, how it applied to contemporary media, and how people who share media interpret the term. The report found that in some aspects there was public agreement on the meaning of "noncommercial", but for other aspects, there i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CC-BY-SA
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics to a song, or a photograph of almost anything are all examples of "works". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of a given work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work. There are several types of Creative Commons licenses. Each license differs by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002, by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CC-BY
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics to a song, or a photograph of almost anything are all examples of "works". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of a given work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work. There are several types of Creative Commons licenses. Each license differs by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002, by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proprietary Software
Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modifying it, and—in some cases, as is the case with some patent-encumbered and EULA-bound software—from making use of the software on their own, thereby restricting his or her freedoms. It is often contrasted with open-source or free software. For this reason, it is also known as non-free software or closed-source software. Types Origin Until the late 1960s computers—large and expensive mainframe computers, machines in specially air-conditioned computer rooms—were usually leased to customers rather than sold. Service and all software available were usually supplied by manufacturers without separate charge until 1969. Computer ven ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 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. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Java Research License
The Java Research License (JRL) is a software distribution license created by Sun in an effort to simplify and relax the terms from the "research section" of the Sun Community Source License. Sun's J2SE 1.6.0, ''Mustang'', is licensed under the JRL as well as many projects aJava.net Although the JRL has elements of an open source license, the terms forbid any commercial use and are thus incompatible with both the Free Software Definition and the Open Source Definition ''The Open Source Definition'' is a document published by the Open Source Initiative, to determine whether a software license can be labeled with the open-source certification mark. The definition was taken from the exact text of the Debian Free .... The JRL is a research license to be used for non-commercial academic uses. See also * Sun Microsystems * Java Research License – full text of the JRL External links * Software licenses Sun Microsystems {{prog-lang-stub ... [...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 ... |
