The Adaptive Public License (APL) is 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. This allows end users and commercial compa ...

from the

University of Victoria The University of Victoria (UVic or Victoria) is a public research university located in the municipalities of Oak Bay and Saanich, British Columbia, Canada. The university traces its roots to Victoria College, the first post-secondary instit ...

. It is a weak

copyleft 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. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...

, adaptable template license that has been approved by the

Open Source Initiative The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is the steward of the Open Source Definition, the set of rules that define open source software. It is a California public-benefit nonprofit corporation,_with_501(c)(3).html" ;"title="110. - 6910./ref> is a type o ...

. The Initial Contributor for a project sets up the license conditions for that project by choosing their specific options from the license template. Choices include: * whether or not to grant

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...

rights * governing jurisdiction * limited attribution and branding clauses * the scope of how widely the source can be distributed before being obliged to contribute code changes * the extent to which changes need to be documented

Selected programs licensed under the APL

MusicDNS AmpliFIND is an acoustic fingerprinting service and a software development kit developed by the US company MusicIP. MusicIP first marketed their fingerprinting algorithm and service as MusicDNS. In 2006, MusicIP reported that the MusicDNS database ...

SwisTrack SwisTrack is a tool for tracking robots, humans, animals and objects using a camera or a recorded video as input source. It uses Intel's OpenCV library for fast image processing and contains interfaces for USB, FireWire and GigE cameras, as well ...

External links

The Adaptive Public License
Free and open-source software licenses Copyleft software licenses