Software Licensing
What is Software Licensing?
Software licensing describes the legal rights pertaining to the authorized use of digital material. Failure to adhere to software license agreement terms often incurs criminal charges related to licensed intellectual property (IP) and copyrighted material.
Simply that is an agreement between you and the owner of a software program that allows you to do certain things that would otherwise be an infringement of copyright law.
The software license usually answers questions such as,
- Where and how and how often can you install the program?
- Can you copy, modify, or redistribute it?
- Can you look at the underlying source code?
- Duration? etc.
Types of Licenses
The spectrum of rights granted by various licenses is shown in the following diagram by Mark Webbink, ex-General Counsel at Red Hat:
1.Trade Secret
A trade secret is a valuable form of intellectual property that is used when an owner seeks protection that is provided by other forms of property rights, such as those bestowed by a patent, but does not want the components of the property made public. In most cases, a trade secret provides the owner with a competitive advantage over other companies or individuals.
Although often referred to as a patent, because, as is often the case with a patent, they protect a process, trade secrets are not a patent, and thus a trade secret agreement does differ from a patent.
Categories in a trade secret agreement are :
- License terms
- Payment terms
- General terms
2. Proprietary License / End User License Agreement (EULA):
EULA stands for an End-user License Agreement (also called Software License Agreement (SLA ), or Licensed Application End-User Agreement). Generally, EULA is a legally binding agreement between the owner of a product (often software) and the end-user , more specifically a contract between the licencor of a product and the licensee.
One of the most widely known proprietary software pieces are Microsoft Windows, macOS, iTunes.
3.Protective FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)License / Copyleft
A software could be called free and open source in case its source code is publicly available and distributed for free for any field of endeavor.
protective licenses force the author of derivatives or re-distributor of the software to open the modified code.Such licenses oblige the derivatives of copyleft license to be placed under copyleft too.
Most popular copyleft licence are:
- GPL-General Public License
It is the most commonly used free software license. It was written by Richard Stallman of Free Software Foundation for GNU Project. This license allows software to be freely used, modified, and redistributed by anyone. WordPress is also released under the GPL license, which means that WordPress is an open source software that can be used, modified, and extended by anyone.
- Mechanical
- Eclipse Public License 1.0
- Mozilla Public License 2.0
- Open Software Licence 3.0
4. Non-protective FOSS License
These licenses do not protect the code from being used in non-open source apps and apply no restrictions on the derivatives. Some of them, however, require attribution. Permissive licenses have larger compatibility than protective ones, which cannot be blindly combined and mixed.
Here are a few examples of non-protective licenses, which could be safely used for development purposes:
The MIT license is a free software license created by the MIT(Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Being a permissive license, it puts very limited restrictions on reuse, which means it has great license compatibility.
Examples of software under this license: Angular, Sass, Bootstrap, JQuery, InfluxDB, NodeJS.
The BSD license is imposing minimal restrictions on the use and redistribution of covered software. Unlike the copyleft licenses, with reciprocity share-alike requirements, the BSD license is a simple license that merely requires all code licensed under the BSD license to be licensed under the BSD license if redistributed in source code format.
Examples of software under these licenses: Django, ReactJS, Scala, Go, Falcon.
It is written by the Apache Software Foundation, also allows freedom in use and distribution of software under it, with the preservation of copyright notice and disclaimer. It also allows the user of the software the freedom to use the software for any purpose, modify it, and distribute the modified versions of the software, under the terms of the license, without concern for royalties.
software under this license: Apache products, Android OS, Docker, BeanShell, Kotlin.
5. Public Domain License
Public domain equivalent license belongs to the licenses that grant public-domain-like rights or/and act as waivers. They are used to make copyrighted works usable by anyone without conditions while avoiding the complexities of attribution or license compatibility that occur with other licenses.(Wikipedia)
Examples for public domain like license are:
- Zero/public domain (CC0):
It’s a copyright wavier and public-domain-like license. CC0 was created to boost the compatibility with legal domains which have no concept of dedicating to the public domain.
WTFPL license , a public-domain-like license
Unlicense, a copyright waiver and public-domain-like license
Managing your licenses efficiently with your customers leads to understanding your customers better, which then helps you grow your revenue as a software developer. It also protects your product against losses occurred from piracy.
There are, however, different types of licenses available and that’s where it can get more complicated. Using a dedicated Software Licensing service can help you to focus on building great products, manage the type of license you want to offer, and protect your intellectual property.
