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.[1] 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.
Free and open
Non-free
Public domain
Permissive license (can be used in closed source s/w)
Copyleft (protective license)
Noncommercial license
Proprietary license
Trade secret
Description
Grants all rights
Grants use rights, including right to relicense (allows proprietization, license compatibility)
Grants use rights, forbids proprietization
Grants rights for noncommercial use only. May be combined with copyleft.
Traditional use of copyright; no rights need be granted
No information made public
Software
PD, CC0
MIT, Apache, MPL, BSD
GPL, AGPL
JRL, AFPL
Proprietary software, no public license
private, internal software
Other creative works
PD, CC0
CC BY
CC BY-SA
CC BY-NC
Copyright, no public license
unpublished
^Hancock, Terry (2008-08-29). "What if copyright didn't apply to binary executables?". Free Software Magazine. Retrieved 2016-01-25.
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