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What does a License mean ?

License basically means permission. A licence is an official document which gives you permission to do, use, or own something. It involves two party in which license is granted by a party to another party as an element of an agreement between those parties.

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What is Software Licensing?

Whenever a new application is released by a software company , Then that software is protected by copyrights. It provides legally binding guidelines for the use and distribution of software. In the License document, the responsibilities of each party are clearly defined, preventing and protecting the developer from infringement of copyright law. It includes some common section in the agreement:

  • Prevents customers from abusing your software - Customer can copy your software and abuse it by selling it in a profit and by owning it. Without getting a signed licensing agreement, there's nothing stopping your customer from attempting to copy your software

  • Allows you to license the software without selling it - While having your rights on the software you can make customer pay for your software licensing.

  • Allows you to freely revoke licenses - It will givw you the freedom to freely suspend your license at any time helping you keep complete control over the software.

Different types of software license

  • Open Source Software License : This license allows software programs to be used , distributed and modified by the end users. There are mainly two different types of Opensource software license
  1. Public domain license
  2. permissive license

  • Public domain License : It is a license used for software is publically available , anyone can modify and use the software without any restrictions. It may be this way because the copyright has expired, or because the person entitled to control the copyright has disclaimed that right. Thats ehy these software maybe freely available or paid but are certain to use.

  • Permissive License : It is also known as APACHE STYLE OR BSD STYLE . This license grants the prmission about "How softwares can be distributed and modified.This type of software license is the most popular license used with free and open source software. It has another variant known as MIT LICENSE . (Discussed in section 7.2 and 7.3)

  • LGPL : The GNU Lesser General Public License allows you to link to open source libraries in your software.This allows a developer or a company to integrate a software component into their own software. It was published in 1991. It is also used for opensource softwares. It is similar to the permissive license but the exception is that the source of the library can not be modified.

Understanding types of licenses with restrictness

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