Free license

The invention of the term "free license" and the focus on the rights of users were connected to the sharing traditions of the hacker culture of the 1970s public domain software ecosystem, the social and political free software movement (since 1980) and the open source movement (since the 1990s).

[4] Intellectual property (IP) laws restrict the modification and sharing of creative works.

[5] Free and open-source licenses use these existing legal structures for an inverse purpose.

[6] They grant the recipient the rights to use the software, examine the source code, modify it, and distribute the modifications.

[7] After 1980, the United States began to treat software as a literary work covered by copyright law.

[19] Software developers have filed cases as copyright infringement and as breaches of contract.

Network of licenses (and years of license creation)
A pie chart displays the most commonly used open source license as Apache at 30%, MIT at 26%, GPL at 18%, BSD at 8%, LGPL at 3%, MPL at 2%, and remaining 13% as licenses with below 1% market share each.
Popular free and open source licenses include the Apache License , the MIT License , the GNU General Public License (GPL), the BSD Licenses , the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and the Mozilla Public License (MPL).
Definition of Free Cultural Works logo, selected in a logo contest in 2006 [ 21 ]