Free-software license
[6][7][8] Likewise, the similar GCC General Public License was applied to the GNU Compiler Collection, which was initially published in 1987.
[11][12][13] Starting in the mid-1990s and until the mid-2000s, the open-source movement pushed and focused the free-software idea forward in the wider public and business perception.
[19] The US case (MySQL vs Progress) was settled before a verdict was arrived at, but at an initial hearing, Judge Saris "saw no reason" that the GPL would not be enforceable.
[20] Around 2004 lawyer Lawrence Rosen argued in the essay Why the public domain isn't a license software could not truly be waived into public domain and can't be interpreted as very permissive FOSS license,[21] a position which faced opposition by Daniel J. Bernstein and others.
[22] In 2012 the dispute was finally resolved when Rosen accepted the CC0 as open source license, while admitting that contrary to his previous claims copyright can be waived away, backed by Ninth circuit decisions.
[25] Several major FOSS projects (Linux kernel,[26][27] MySQL,[28] BusyBox,[29][30] Blender,[31] VLC media player[32]) decided against adopting the GPLv3.
In June 2016 an analysis of Fedora Project's packages revealed as most used licenses the GPL, MIT, BSD, and the LGPL.
[39] The group Open Source Initiative (OSI) defines and maintains a list of approved open-source licenses.
There exists an ongoing debate within the free-software community regarding the fine line between what restrictions can be applied and still be called "free".
Permissive licenses might carry small obligations like attribution of the author but allow practically all code use cases.
[44] Most newly written free-software licenses since the late 1990s include some form of patent retaliation clauses.
Examples include prohibiting that the software be used for non-private applications, for military purposes, for comparison or benchmarking, for good use,[clarification needed] for ethically questionable means,[52] or in commercial organizations.
[53] While some restrictions on user freedom, e.g. concerning nuclear war, seem to enjoy moral support among most free software developers,[54] it is generally believed that such agendas should not be served through software licenses; among other things because of practical aspects such as resulting legal uncertainties and problems with enforceability of vague, broad and/or subjective criteria or because tool makers are generally not held responsible for other people's use of their tools.
[55] Among the repeated attempts[56][57][58] by developers to regulate user behavior through the license that sparked wider debate are Douglas Crockford's (joking) “no evil” clause, which affected the release process of the Debian distribution in 2012[59] and got the JSMin-PHP project expelled from Google Code,[60] the addition of a pacifist condition based on Asimov's First Law of Robotics to the GPL for the distributed computing software GPU in 2005,[61] as well as several software projects trying to exclude use by big cloud providers.
[62][63] As there are several defining organizations and groups who publish definitions and guidelines about FOSS licenses, notably the FSF, the OSI, the Debian project, and the BSDs, there are sometimes conflicting opinions and interpretations.
Essentially, the BSD license's only requirement is to acknowledge the original authors, and poses no restrictions on how the source code may be used.
For instance, Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 and macOS have proprietary IP stacks which are derived from BSD-licensed software.
[65] In extreme cases, the sub- or re-licensing possibilities with BSD or other permissive licenses might prevent further use in the open-source ecosystem.
[66][67][68] Supporters of the BSD license argue that it is more free than the GPL because it grants the right to do anything with the source code, provided that the attribution is preserved.
Proponents of the GPL point out that once code becomes proprietary, users are denied the freedoms that define free software.
Also, the FSF recommended GNU Free Documentation License,[70] which is incompatible with the GPL,[71] was considered "non-free" by the Debian project around 2006,[72] Nathanael Nerode,[73] and Bruce Perens.
A study from 2012, which used publicly available data, criticized Black Duck Software for not publishing their methodology used in collecting statistics.
[78] Daniel German, professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria in Canada, presented a talk in 2013 about the methodological challenges in determining which are the most widely used free-software licenses, and showed how he could not replicate the result from Black Duck Software.
