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77-646: Derived from the Mozilla Public License 1.1, the CDDL tries to address some of the problems of the MPL. Like the MPL, the CDDL is a weak copyleft license in-between GPL license and BSD / MIT permissive licenses , requiring only source code files under CDDL to remain under CDDL. Unlike strong copyleft licenses like the GPL, mixing of CDDL licensed source code files with source code files under other licenses

154-453: A copyleft-licensed work are expected to reciprocate the author's action of copyleft-licensing the software by also copyleft-licensing any derivatives they might have made. Because of this requirement, copyleft licenses have also been described as "viral" due to their self-perpetuating terms. In addition to restrictions on copying, copyleft licenses address other possible impediments. They ensure that rights cannot be later revoked , and require

231-614: A different, even proprietary license, thereby forming a "larger work" which can be distributed under any terms, but again the MPL-covered source files must be made freely available. This makes the MPL a compromise between the MIT or BSD licenses , which permit all derived works to be relicensed as proprietary, and the GPL, which requires the derived work as a whole to be licensed under the GPL. By allowing proprietary modules in derived projects while requiring core files to remain open source,

308-527: A divisive issue in the ideological strife between the Open Source Initiative and the free software movement . However, there is evidence that copyleft is both accepted and proposed by both parties: " Viral license " is a pejorative name for copyleft licenses. It originates from the terms 'General Public Virus' or 'GNU Public Virus' (GPV), which dates back to 1990, a year after the GPLv1

385-419: A fee. Unlike similar permissive licenses that also grant these freedoms, copyleft licenses also ensure that any modified versions of a work covered by a copyleft license must also grant these freedoms. Thus, copyleft licenses have conditions: that modifications of any work licensed under a copyleft license must be distributed under a compatible copyleft scheme and that the distributed modified work must include

462-589: A letter in 1984 or 1985, on which was written: "Copyleft – all rights reversed ", which is a pun on the common copyright disclaimer " all rights reserved ". In France , a series of meetings taking place in 2000 under the title "Copyleft Attitude" gave birth to the Free Art License (FAL), theoretically valid in any jurisdiction bound by the Berne Convention and recommended by Stallman's own Free Software Foundation . Shortly thereafter,

539-593: A license that allows one to use GNU GPL in combination with a limited warranty. For projects which will be run over a network, a variation of the GNU GPL, called the Affero General Public License (GNU AGPL), ensures that the source code is available to users of software over a network. Copyleft is a distinguishing feature of some free software licenses, while other free-software licenses are not copyleft licenses because they do not require

616-486: A means of modifying the work. Under fair use , however, copyleft licenses may be superseded, just like regular copyrights. Therefore, any person utilizing a source licensed under a copyleft license for works they invent is free to choose any other license (or none at all) provided they meet the fair use standard. Copyleft licenses necessarily make creative use of relevant rules and laws to enforce their provisions. For example, when using copyright law, those who contribute to

693-420: A program's users, no matter what subsequent revisions anyone made to the original program. This original GPL did not grant rights to the public at large, only those who had already received the program; but it was the best that could be done under existing law. The new license was not at this time given the copyleft label. Richard Stallman stated that the use of "Copyleft" comes from Don Hopkins , who mailed him

770-527: A separate, unrelated initiative in the United States yielded the Creative Commons license , available since 2001 in several different versions (only some of which can be described as copyleft) and more specifically tailored to U.S. law. While copyright law gives software authors control over copying, distribution and modification of their works, the goal of copyleft is to give all users of

847-417: A work (except the license itself) may only be modified and distributed under the terms of the work's copyleft license. Partial copyleft, by contrast, exempts some parts of the work from the copyleft provisions, permitting distribution of some modifications under terms other than the copyleft license, or in some other way does not impose all the principles of copylefting on the work. An example of partial copyleft

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924-410: A work the freedom and permission to reproduce, adapt , or distribute it, copyleft licenses are distinct from other types of copyright licenses that limit such freedoms. Instead of allowing a work to fall completely into the public domain , where no ownership of copyright is claimed, copyleft allows authors to impose restrictions on the use of their work. One of the main restrictions imposed by copyleft

1001-490: A work under copyleft usually must gain, defer, or assign copyright holder status. By submitting the copyright of their contributions under a copyleft license, they deliberately give up some of the rights that normally follow from copyright, including the right to be the unique distributor of copies of the work. Some laws used for copyleft licenses vary from one country to another, and may also be granted in terms that vary from country to country. For example, in some countries, it

1078-518: Is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird . The MPL license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns of both open-source and proprietary developers. It is distinguished from others as a middle ground between the permissive software BSD-style licenses and the GNU General Public License . As such, it allows

1155-757: Is a mirrored version of the copyright symbol , © : a reversed C in a circle. A 2016 proposal to add the symbol to a future version of Unicode was accepted by the Unicode Technical Committee . The code point U+1F12F 🄯 COPYLEFT SYMBOL was added in Unicode 11 . The copyleft symbol has no legal status. As of 2024, the symbol is generally provided as standard in the system fonts of most current operating systems , but if need be it may be approximated with character U+2184 ↄ LATIN SMALL LETTER REVERSED C between parenthesis (ɔ) . On modern computer systems,

1232-555: Is acceptable to sell a software product without warranty, in standard GNU General Public License style, while in most European countries it is not permitted for a software distributor to waive all warranties regarding a sold product. For this reason, the extent of such warranties is specified in most European copyleft licenses, for example, the European Union Public Licence (EUPL), or the CeCILL license ,

1309-725: Is an independent project and does not violate the GPLv3 . Schilling also argued that even though the GPL requires all scripts required to build the work to be licensed freely, they do not necessarily have to be under the GPL. Thus not causing an incompatibility that violates the license . He also argued that in "combined works" (in contrast to " derived works ") GPL and CDDL licensed code is compatible. Red Hat 's attorneys have prevented cdrtools from being in Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux , arguing that Schilling has an "unorthodox" view of copyright law that isn't shared by their legal counsel or

1386-711: Is copyleft under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Li-Chen Wang 's Palo Alto Tiny BASIC for the Intel 8080 appeared in Dr. Dobb's Journal in May 1976. The listing begins with the title, author's name, and date, but also has "@COPYLEFT ALL WRONGS RESERVED". The concept of copyleft was described in Richard Stallman 's GNU Manifesto in 1985, where he wrote: GNU

1463-401: Is determined by the extent to which its provisions can be imposed on all kinds of derivative works. Thus, the term "weak copyleft" refers to licenses where not all derivative works inherit the copyleft license; whether a derivative work inherits or not often depends on how it was derived. "Weak copyleft" licenses are often used to cover software libraries . This allows other software to link to

1540-510: Is lost if the code implementing a patented feature is modified. The previous software license used by Sun for its open source projects was the Sun Public License (SPL), also derived from the Mozilla Public License . The CDDL license is considered by Sun (now Oracle ) to be SPL version 2. The CDDL was developed by a Sun Microsystems team (among them Solaris kernel engineer Andrew Tucker and Claire Giordano), based on

1617-427: Is more important than a copyleft. Common practice for using copyleft is to codify the copying terms for a work with a license . Any such license typically includes all the provisions and principles of copyleft inside the license's terms. This includes the freedom to use the work, study the work, copy, and share the work with others, modify the work, and distribute exact or modified versions of that work, with or without

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1694-430: Is no reason to believe the GPL could force proprietary software to become free software, but could "try to enjoin the firm from distributing commercially a program that combined with the GPL'd code to form a derivative work, and to recover damages for infringement." If the firm "actually copied code from a GPL'd program, such a suit would be a perfectly ordinary assertion of copyright, which most private firms would defend if

1771-400: Is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary modifications will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free. Stallman's motivation was that a few years earlier he had worked on a Lisp interpreter. Symbolics asked to use

1848-413: Is permitted without relicensing. The resulting compiled software product ("binary") can be licensed and sold under a different license, as long as the source code is still available under CDDL, which should enable more commercial business cases, according to Sun. Like the MPL the CDDL includes a patent grant to the licensee from all contributors ("patent peace"). However, in section 2.1(d), the patent grant

1925-421: Is that derived works must also be released under a compatible copyleft license. This is due to the underlying principle of copyleft: that anyone can benefit freely from the previous work of others, but that any modifications to that work should benefit everyone else as well, and thus must be released under similar terms. For this reason, copyleft licenses are also known as reciprocal licenses: any modifiers of

2002-525: Is that not everyone wants to share their work, and some share-alike agreements require that the whole body of work be shared, even if the author only wants to share a certain part. The plus side for an author of source code is that any modification to the code will not only benefit the original author but that the author will be recognized and ensure the same or compatible license terms cover the changed code. Some Creative Commons licenses are examples of share-alike copyleft licenses. Those licenses grant users of

2079-496: Is the GPL linking exception made for some software packages. The " share-alike " condition in some licenses imposes the requirement that any freedom that is granted regarding the original work must be granted on exactly the same or compatible terms in any derived work. This implies that any copyleft license is automatically a share-alike license but not the other way around, as some share-alike licenses include further restrictions such as prohibiting commercial use. Another restriction

2156-564: Is upgraded to version 2.0 by this mechanism, the 1.x-covered code must be marked with the aforementioned GPL-incompatible notice. The MPL can be modified to form a new license, provided that said license does not refer to Mozilla or Netscape. Version 1.0 of the MPL was written by Mitchell Baker in 1998 while working as a lawyer at Netscape Communications Corporation . Netscape was hoping that an open-source strategy for developing its own Netscape web browser would allow it to compete better with Microsoft 's browser, Internet Explorer . To cover

2233-503: The Apache License , is included to protect an auxiliary distributor's further recipients against patent trolling . The contributors disclaim warranty and liability , but allow auxiliary distributors to offer such things on their own behalf. In exchange for the rights granted by license, the licensee must meet certain responsibilities concerning the distribution of licensed source code. Covered source code files must remain under

2310-405: The GNU General Public License (GPL), originally written by Richard Stallman , which was the first software copyleft license to see extensive use; the Mozilla Public License ; the Free Art License ; and the Creative Commons share-alike license condition —with the last two being intended for non-software works, such as documents and pictures, both academic or artistic in nature. Misplaced Pages

2387-552: The GNU Lesser General Public License and the Mozilla Public License . The GNU General Public License is an example of a license implementing strong copyleft. An even stronger copyleft license is the AGPL , which requires the publishing of the source code for software as a service use cases. The Sybase Open Watcom Public License is one of the strongest copyleft licenses, as this license closes

Common Development and Distribution License - Misplaced Pages Continue

2464-459: The MPL version 1.1. On December 1, 2004 the CDDL was submitted for approval to the Open Source Initiative and was approved as an open source license in mid January 2005. The second CDDL proposal, submitted in early January 2005, includes some corrections that prevent the CDDL from being in conflict with European Copyright law and to allow single developers to use the CDDL for their work. In 2006, in

2541-668: The FSF asserts it does not and explicitly adds an exception allowing it in the license for the GNU Classpath re-implementation of the Java library. This ambiguity is an important difference between the GPL and the LGPL , in that the LGPL specifically allows linking or compiling works licensed under terms that are not compatible with the LGPL, with works covered by the LGPL. The copyleft symbol

2618-573: The Free Software Foundation to discourage using version 1.1. For these reasons, earlier versions of Firefox were released under multiple licenses: the MPL 1.1, GPL 2.0, and LGPL 2.1. Some old software, such as the Mozilla Application Suite, is still under the three licenses . Therefore, in early 2010, after more than a decade without modification, an open process for creating version 2.0 of the MPL began. Over

2695-577: The Free Software Foundation. In 2015, the CDDL to GPL compatibility question reemerged when Ubuntu announced inclusion of OpenZFS by default. In 2016 Ubuntu announced that a legal review resulted in the conclusion that it is legally acceptable to use ZFS as binary kernel module in Linux. (As opposed to building it into the kernel image itself.) Others followed Ubuntu's conclusion, for instance James E. J. Bottomley argued there cannot be "a convincing theory of harm" developed, making it impossible to bring

2772-464: The GPL poses a threat to the intellectual property of any organization making use of it." In another context, Steve Ballmer declared that code released under GPL is useless to the commercial sector, since it can only be used if the resulting surrounding code is licensed under a GPL-compatible license, and described it thus as "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches". In response to Microsoft's attacks on

2849-433: The GPL, several prominent free-software developers and advocates released a joint statement supporting the license. According to FSF compliance engineer David Turner, the term "viral license" creates a misunderstanding and a fear of using copylefted free software. While a person can catch a virus without active action, license conditions take effect upon effective usage or adoption. David McGowan has also written that there

2926-485: The Lisp interpreter, and Stallman agreed to supply them with a public domain version of his work. Symbolics extended and improved the Lisp interpreter, but when Stallman wanted access to the improvements that Symbolics had made to his interpreter, Symbolics refused. Stallman then, in 1984, proceeded to work towards eradicating this emerging behavior and culture of proprietary software , which he named software hoarding . This

3003-405: The MPL is designed to motivate both businesses and the open-source community to help develop core software. The one exception to covered source files remaining under the MPL occurs when code under version 2.0 or later is combined with separate code files under the GNU GPL, GNU Lesser GPL (LGPL), or Affero GPL (AGPL). In this case, the program as a whole will be under the chosen GNU license, but

3080-492: The MPL, and distributors "may not attempt to alter or restrict recipients' rights" to it. The MPL treats the source code file as the boundary between MPL-licensed and proprietary parts, meaning that all or none of the code in a given source file falls under the MPL. An executable consisting solely of MPL-covered files may be sublicensed, but the licensee must ensure access to or provide all the source code within it. Recipients can combine licensed source code with other files under

3157-441: The MPL-covered files will be dual-licensed, so that recipients can choose to distribute them under that GNU License or the MPL. The initial author of MPL code may choose to opt out of this GPL compatibility by adding a notice to its source files. It is explicitly granted that MPL-covered code may be distributed under the terms of the license version under which it was received or any later version. If code under version 1.0 or 1.1

Common Development and Distribution License - Misplaced Pages Continue

3234-493: The availability of both types of licenses, copyleft and permissive, allow authors to choose the type under which to license the works they invent. For documents, art, and other works other than software and code, the Creative Commons share-alike licensing system and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) allow authors to apply limitations to certain sections of their work, exempting some parts of

3311-606: The browser's code, the company drafted a license known as the Netscape Public License (NPL), which included a clause allowing even openly developed code to be theoretically relicensed as proprietary. However, at the same time, Baker developed a second license similar to the NPL. It was called the Mozilla Public License after Netscape's project name for the new open-source codebase, and, although it

3388-534: The case to court. Eben Moglen , co-author of the GPLv3 and founder of the SFLC , argued that while the letter of the GPL might be violated, the spirit of both licenses is unharmed, which would be the relevant aspect in court. The SFLC mentioned also that a precedent exists with the Andrew File System 's kernel module, which is not considered a derivative work of the kernel by the kernel developers. On

3465-546: The code under the then unreleased GNU GPL v3 would have taken several years, and would probably also have involved mass resignations from engineers (unhappy with either the delay, the GPL, or both—this is not clear from the video). Later, in September 2006, Phipps rejected Cooper's assertion in even stronger terms. Similarly, Bryan Cantrill , who was at Sun at that time and involved in the release of CDDL licensed software stated in 2015 that he and his colleagues expected in 2006

3542-456: The communication is abstract, such as executing a command-line tool with a set of switches or interacting with a web server. As a consequence, even if one module of an otherwise non-copyleft product is placed under the GPL, it may still be legal for other components to communicate with it in ways such as these. This allowed communication may or may not include reusing libraries or routines via dynamic linking  – some commentators say it does,

3619-462: The engineers who had written the Solaris kernel requested that the license of OpenSolaris be GPL-incompatible. Mozilla was selected partially because it is GPL incompatible. That was part of the design when they released OpenSolaris. ... the engineers who wrote Solaris ... had some biases about how it should be released, and you have to respect that. Simon Phipps (Sun's Chief Open Source Officer at

3696-499: The fast emergence of CDDL licensed software into the Linux ecosystem and the CDDL being not an obstacle. The GPL compatibility question was also the source of a controversy behind a partial relicensing of cdrtools to the CDDL which had been previously all GPL. In 2006, the Debian project declared the cdrtools legally undistributable because the build system was licensed under the CDDL. The author, Jörg Schilling, claimed that smake

3773-425: The final draft of version 2.0 on January 3, 2012. Copyleft Higher categories: Software , freedom Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works . In this sense, freedoms refers to the use of the work for any purpose, and the ability to modify, copy, share, and redistribute

3850-563: The first draft of the OSI's license proliferation committee report, the CDDL is one of nine preferred licenses listed as popular, widely used, or with strong communities. While the Free Software Foundation (FSF) also considered the CDDL a free software license, they saw some incompatibilities with their GNU General Public License (GPL). The question of whether and when both licenses are incompatible sparked debates in

3927-457: The free software domain in 2004 to 2006. For instance, the FSF considered the CDDL incompatible to their GPL license, without going into detail until 2016. CDDL is one of several Open Source Licenses which are incompatible with GPL . This characteristic was inherited from the MPL 1.1 (fixed with the MPL 2.0 according to the FSF) and results from a complex interaction of several clauses; the root of

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4004-555: The integration of MPL-licensed code into proprietary codebases, as long as the MPL-licensed components remain accessible under the terms of the MPL. MPL has been used by others, such as Adobe to license their Flex product line, and The Document Foundation to license LibreOffice 4.0 (also on LGPL 3+). Version 1.1 was adapted by several projects to form derivative licenses like Sun Microsystems ' Common Development and Distribution License . It has undergone two revisions:

4081-558: The library and be redistributed without the requirement for the linking software to also be licensed under the same terms. Only changes to the software licensed under a "weak copyleft" license become subject itself to copyleft provisions of such a license. This allows programs of any license to be compiled and linked against copylefted libraries such as glibc and then redistributed without any re-licensing required. The concrete effect of strong vs. weak copyleft has yet to be tested in court. Free-software licenses that use "weak" copyleft include

4158-438: The licensee to distribute derivative works under the same license. There is an ongoing debate as to which class of license provides the greater degree of freedom. This debate hinges on complex issues, such as the definition of freedom and whose freedoms are more important: the potential future recipients of a work (freedom from proprietization) or just the initial recipient (freedom to proprietize). However, current copyright law and

4235-436: The minor update 1.1, and a major update version 2.0 nearing the goals of greater simplicity and better compatibility with other licenses. The MPL defines rights as passing from "contributors", who create or modify source code, through an optional auxiliary distributor (itself a licensee), to the licensee. It grants liberal copyright and patent licenses allowing for free use, modification, distribution, and "exploit[ation]" of

4312-406: The next 21 months, the MPL was not only changed to make the license clearer and easier to apply, but also to achieve compatibility with the GPL and Apache licenses. The revision team was overseen by Baker and led by Luis Villa with key support from Gervase Markham and Harvey Anderson. They would publish three alpha drafts, two beta drafts, and two release candidates for comment before releasing

4389-631: The other hand, Bradley M. Kuhn and attorney Karen M. Sandler from the Software Freedom Conservancy argued that Ubuntu would violate both licenses, as a binary ZFS module would be a derivative work of the kernel. In April 2016, the Ubuntu 16.04  LTS release included the CDDL-licensed ZFS on Linux . Example projects released under CDDL: Mozilla Public License The Mozilla Public License ( MPL )

4466-508: The problem being GPL virality , similar to other cases of GPL incompatibility. Some people argue that Sun (or the Sun engineer) as creator of the license made the CDDL intentionally GPL incompatible. According to Danese Cooper one of the reasons for basing the CDDL on the Mozilla license was that the Mozilla license is GPL-incompatible . Cooper stated, at the 6th annual Debian conference , that

4543-427: The quality of their software to compete with free software. This may also have the effect of preventing monopolies in areas dominated by proprietary software. However, competition with proprietary software can also be a reason to forgo copyleft. The Free Software Foundation recommends that when "widespread use of the code is vital for advancing the cause of free software", allowing the code to be copied and used freely

4620-411: The shoe were on the other foot." Richard Stallman has described this view with an analogy, saying, "The GPL's domain does not spread by proximity or contact, only by deliberate inclusion of GPL-covered code in your program. It spreads like a spider plant , not like a virus." Popular copyleft licenses, such as the GPL, have a clause allowing components to interact with non-copyleft components as long as

4697-609: The so-called "private usage" loophole of the GPL, and requires the publishing of source code in any use case. For this reason, the license is considered non-free by the Free Software Foundation , the GNU Project , and the Debian project. However, the license is accepted as open source by the OSI . The Design Science License (DSL) is a strong copyleft license that applies to any work, not only software or documentation, but also literature, artworks, music, photography, and video. DSL

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4774-490: The software the same freedoms as copyleft licenses but do not require modified versions of that software to also include those freedoms. They have minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, and are thus not copyleft licenses. Examples of this type of license include the X11 license , Apache license , Expat license , and the various BSD licenses . It has been suggested that copyleft has become

4851-698: The software. Some creators, such as Elastic , feel that preventing commercial enterprises from using and then selling their product under a proprietary license is also an incentive. Furthermore, the open-source culture of programming has been described as a gift economy , where social power is determined by an individual's contributions. Contributing to or creating open-source, copyleft-licensed software of high quality can lead to contributors gaining valuable experience and can lead to future career opportunities. Copyleft software has economic effects beyond individual creators. The presence of quality copyleft software can force proprietary software developers to increase

4928-466: The time), who had introduced Cooper as "the one who actually wrote the CDDL", did not immediately comment, but later in the same video, he says, referring back to the license issue, "I actually disagree with Danese to some degree", while describing the strong preference among the engineers who wrote the code for a BSD-like license, which was in conflict with Sun's preference for something copyleft , and that waiting for legal clearance to release some parts of

5005-525: The work and its derivatives to be provided in a form that allows further modifications to be made. In software , this means requiring that the source code of the derived work be made available together with the software itself. The economic incentives to work on copyleft content can vary. Traditional copyright law is designed to promote progress by providing economic benefits to creators. When choosing to copyleft their work, content creators may seek complementary benefits like recognition from their peers. In

5082-453: The work from the full copyleft mechanism. In the case of the GFDL, these limitations include the use of invariant sections, which may not be altered by future editors. The initial intention of the GFDL was as a device for supporting the documentation of copylefted software. However, the result is that it can be used for any kind of document. The strength of the copyleft license governing a work

5159-464: The work must be made available to recipients of the software program, which are often distributed as executables . This information is most commonly in the form of source code files, which usually contain a copy of the license terms and acknowledge the authors of the code. Copyleft helps ensure everyone's rights to freely use the product but it prohibits owning, registering copyright and earning royalties from copyright. Notable copyleft licenses include

5236-632: The work the freedom to carry out all of these activities. These freedoms (from the Free Software Definition ) include: Similar terms are present in the Open Source Definition , a separate definition that contains similar freedoms. The vast majority of copyleft licenses satisfy both definitions, that of the Free Software Definition and Open Source Definition. By guaranteeing viewers and users of

5313-423: The work, but does not grant the licensee any rights to a contributor's trademarks . These rights will terminate if the licensee fails to comply with the license's terms and conditions, but a violating licensee who returns to compliance regains its rights, and even receiving written notice from a contributor will result in losing rights to that contributor's code only. A patent retaliation clause, similar to that of

5390-476: The work, with or without a fee. Licenses which implement copyleft can be used to maintain copyright conditions for works ranging from computer software , to documents , art , and scientific discoveries, and similar approaches have even been applied to certain patents . Copyleft software licenses are considered protective or reciprocal in contrast with permissive free software licenses , and require that information necessary for reproducing and modifying

5467-494: The world of computer programming, copyleft-licensed computer programs are often created by programmers to fill a need they have noticed. Such programs are often published with a copyleft license simply to ensure that subsequent users can also freely use modified versions of that program. This is especially true for creators who wish to prevent "open source hijacking", or the act of reusing open-source code and then adding extra restrictions to it, an action prevented by copyleft-licensing

5544-540: The wrongs he perceived it to perpetuate, he decided to work within the framework of existing law; in 1985, he created his own copyright license, the Emacs General Public License, the first copyleft license. This later evolved into the GNU General Public License , which is now one of the most popular free-software licenses. For the first time, a copyright holder had taken steps to ensure that the maximal number of rights be perpetually transferred to

5621-402: Was meant to encourage cooperation with developers that preferred stricter licenses like the GPL. Not only would many projects derive their own licenses from this version, but its structure, legal precision, and explicit terms for patent rights would strongly influence later revisions of popular licenses like the GPL (version 3). Both versions 1.0 and 1.1 are incompatible with the GPL, which led

5698-436: Was not the first time Stallman had dealt with proprietary software, but he deemed this interaction a "turning point". He justified software sharing, protesting that when sharing, the software online can be copied without the loss of the original piece of work. The software can be used multiple times without ever being damaged or worn out. As Stallman deemed it impractical in the short term to eliminate current copyright law and

5775-727: Was originally only intended for software that supplemented core modules covered by the NPL, it would become much more popular than the NPL and eventually earn approval from the Open Source Initiative. Less than a year later, Baker and the Mozilla Organization would make some changes to the MPL, resulting in version 1.1, a minor update. This revision was done through an open process that considered comments from both institutional and individual contributors. The primary goals were to clarify terms regarding patents and allow for multiple licensing . This last feature

5852-502: Was released. The name 'viral license' refers to the fact that any works derived from a copyleft work must preserve the copyleft permissions when distributed. Some advocates of the various BSD Licenses used the term derisively in regards to the GPL's tendency to absorb BSD-licensed code without allowing the original BSD work to benefit from it, while at the same time promoting itself as "freer" than other licenses. Microsoft vice-president Craig Mundie remarked, "This viral aspect of

5929-408: Was written by Michael Stutz after he took an interest in applying GNU-style copyleft to non-software works, which later came to be called libre works . In the 1990s, it was used on music recordings, visual art, and even novels. It is not considered compatible with the GNU GPL by the Free Software Foundation. "Full" and "partial" copyleft relate to another issue. Full copyleft exists when all parts of

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