[SOLVED] What Licenses are OSS Licenses Under?

Toad39 · 2020-09-30 18:05:18

Hello,

I would like to know what licenses open-source licenses (e.g. GPL) are governed under.

Thank you for your time.

Last edited by Toad39 (2020-10-23 17:01:05)

Lone_Wolf · 2020-09-30 18:12:52

Not sure what you mean, there's no central authority for open source licences.

The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Initiative does try to keep track of things.
I think you'll find https://opensource.org/licenses interesting / useful .

Trilby · 2020-09-30 18:33:10

If you mean to ask whether the text of the license is licensed for specific (re)uses, then that will vary by license. In many cases it's not relevant if the content of the license is short and formulaic (e.g., MIT, and BSD licenses) as they would never qualify as copyrightable material. Longer licenses, such as the GPL, it's still questionable as the content could be argued to be comparable to a food recipe for which there is precendent of not being copyrightable, but the FSF certainly could assert ownership if you modified their license inappropriately. And in the case of the GPL, they address this specifically:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL

Meanwhile the very start of the GPL states it's own copyright and license for reuse:

GPL v3 wrote:

Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. <https://fsf.org/>
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

Last edited by Trilby (2020-09-30 18:39:41)

Arch Linux

#1 2020-09-30 18:05:18

[SOLVED] What Licenses are OSS Licenses Under?

#2 2020-09-30 18:12:52

Re: [SOLVED] What Licenses are OSS Licenses Under?

#3 2020-09-30 18:33:10

Re: [SOLVED] What Licenses are OSS Licenses Under?

Board footer