A license is an agreement through which a licensee leases the rights to a legally protected piece of intellectual property from a licensor, the entity which owns or represents the property for use in conjunction with a product or service. It is often an important term in the business entities as people have to depend on another’s product for most of the times.
Licensing is a common thing in the software industry too. A simple example for licensing can be said through the use of windows operating system. Each user has to purchase official license by paying the relevant amount for the product to Microsoft. Like the simple example, licensing is a major concern related to the use of software.
As stated above, a software license is a document that provides legally binding guidelines from the owner of a software to the end users. Software licenses typically provide end users with the right to one or more copies of the software without violating copyrights The license also defines the responsibilities of the parties entering into the license agreement and may impose restrictions on how the software can be used.
An end-user license agreement (EULA) is one approach makers can take to license their software. This is a contract between the owner and purchaser, establishing the purchaser’s right to use the software. The contract may include the different ways the software can be used as well as any rights the buyer has obtained by purchasing the software. This is one of the more basic and commonly used ways to license software.
Another common way of licensing a software is named as white labeling. In this method, a third party will be involved apart from end user and maker of the software. In this method one company will make the software and branding of the software will be done by another company. White labeling allows the makers of the company on owning the product.
There are many different types of software licenses, and the penalties are there for non compliance with the different types of software licenses. The type of license for a software is often decided by the makers and the users have to comply with that. There are mainly five types of software licenses namely Public Domain, Permissive, LGPL, Copyleft, and Proprietary.
Public Domain
Public Domain types of licenses are the most feasible and flexible type of license. It is also known as the most permissive type. When a software is in the public domain, anyone can modify and use the software without any restrictions. In this type of license there will be minimal restrictions, even no restrictions for the end users.
For handling compatibility and legal domains, a concept named CC0 is used in the public domain. This is achieved by a public domain waiver statement and a fallback to the all-permissive license. Still public domain licenses’ guidelines and rules vary from country to country. So users have to consider it as a main concern of risk while using public domain licenses.
Permissive
Permissive licenses are often known as “Apache style” or “BSD style.” They contain minimal requirements about how the software can be modified or redistributed. Perhaps this kind of license is the most popular license used with free and open source software. The popular examples are MIT License, BSD licenses, Apple Public Source License, and the Apache license.
The MIT license is a free software license created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The BSD license is a part of a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and redistribution of covered software. Like these two Apache 2.0 license is also a feasible license which requires preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer.
LGPL
A Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a license for open-source software that allows for provisions for including elements of free software in either free or proprietary software. Lesser General Public License is sometimes referred to as “Library GPL” or “GNU libraries.”
In some ways, LGPL is considered a “weaker” license than the general public license. It provides less of a standard for source code analysis, but there are still requirements for transparency and attribution. The wording of a license can make a difference in how it can be used, and some general characterizations fail to provide a full understanding of what an LGPL license allows and covers.
Copyleft
Copyleft licenses are also known as reciprocal licenses or restrictive licenses. A copyleft license means downstream projects cannot add additional restrictions on the use of the software. If one user uses a software with copyleft licenses and modify some changes there, the user should give the same freedom to his fellow users.
The main difference between copyleft licenses and permissive licenses is that copyleft licenses require these same rights to be included in any derivative works. While the GPL family are the most popular copyleft licenses, they are by no means the only ones. The Mozilla Public License and the Eclipse Public License are also very popular.
Proprietary
Proprietary software consists of software that is licensed by the copyright holder under very specific conditions. In general, you can use the software, but you are not allowed to modify the software or distribute it to others. This is done on purpose to protect the intellectual property invested in software development.
Many proprietary software applications are also commercial, meaning that users have to pay for a license. However, many other proprietary software applications are free. Many specialized software applications, such as those used for database management and various types of enterprise information systems, are also proprietary. Windows and Mac operating systems are best examples for proprietary licensed software.
References:
https://workingmouse.com.au/innovation/software-licensing-why-its-important-and-how-it-can-help-you
