SOFTWARE LICENSING
A software license is a license agreement between the user and the owner of a software program that allows you to do certain things that would otherwise be an infringement of copyright law. In other words, it gives permission to an individual, company, or organization to use a software program.
In most time, it is illegal to purchase one copy of a program and copy it onto multiple computers. From this agreement we can identify
- Where we can install the software program?
- Who can use this?
- How often we can use it?
- How many number of installations can be done?
- Can users copy, modify, or redistribute it
There are different kinds of software license we have to use in our works. Some of they are,
Public Domain
Proprietary
Commercial software
Shareware
Freeware
Open source
BSD
GPL
Among all of these of software license types EULA (End-User License Agreement) is more important. An EULA is a license is a legal contract between a software application author or publisher and the user of that application. This is similar to a rental agreement and when accepting the agreement the user will have permission to use and get benefits from the software.
Let us see other types of software license in more detail.
Public Domain
Anyone can use and modify software in this type of license without any restrictions. But users have to first identify whether those are secured before install them in their machines. Code that doesn’t have an explicit license is not automatically in these license. This includes code snippets that we can find on the internet.
Permissive
Permissive license includes minimal requirements about how the software can modified and redistributed. This type of license need more than just attributing the original portions of the licensed code to the original developers in your own code and documentation. Mostly these are used with free and open source software. Apache license, BSD license, MIT license, Apple public source license are examples for this type.
LGPL — Lesser General Public License
LGPL give chance users to link to open source libraries in their software. If users link this type of license with a library in their code, they can release their application under any license they want. But there are some restrictions when a user copy parts of a library into their code. GNU license is a example for this type.
Copyleft (Reciprocal license, Restrictive license)
Copyleft license allow users to modify the licensed code and distribute new works on it. For example, a component’s license might say the work is free to use and distribute for personal use only. Therefore, any derivative you create would also be limited to personal use only. GPL is an example for this license.
Proprietary
Proprietary means that all rights are reserved. In these software the work will not be modified or redistributed. This is the most restrictive software license.
These are some of license and there are so many other software license we can find. These are created to protect machines from threats and viruses. We can find lot more information from below links.
Thank You!
