What is a software license? A software license is a legal document providing the guidelines and use for the software distribution. It typically contains the end-users with the right to one or more copies of software without violating the copyright. You must be thinking, what is the need for such a license? Every development practice requires us to use some license for our source code at some point. There are many types of licenses for software distribution. The most common ones that are used are provided in detail below:

Public Domain License

Public domain license belongs to the licenses that grant public-domain-like rights or/and act as waivers. They are used to make copyrighted works useful for anyone without circumstances while preventing the complexness of attribution or license compatibility that occur with other permissions. However, in different countries, Public Domain notion may not be defined or defined variously, so utilizing this license can bring certain risks.

Zero/public domain (CC0)

CC0 or Zero/public domain was created to increase the compatibility with legal domains which have no concept of devoting to the public domain. It is obtained by a public domain waiver announcement and a fall-back to the all-permissive authorization.

Permissive Software License

The permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free software license with least laws on how the software can be redistributed. Such permits require more than just applying the first portions of the licensed code to the innovative designers in your system or the documentation.

The examples of permissive licenses are MIT License, BSD licenses, Apple Public Source License, and the Apache license.

Copyleft Software License

Copyleft is a general approach to building a program in an unconstrained way which requires all the modified and full versions of the policy to be free as well. The Copyleft licenses for software require the essential information to propagate and edit the work, to be made accessible to recipients of the binaries. But what does it mean in practice?

If you do divide your application and use some Copyleft library as part of your request, (even if it’s just the run-time linking to a library) also if you do not charge anything, and even if you do not change that library in any way, then you must make the source code of your application usable for end-users.

Making the source available does not mean users can download it automatically. It might be that you must get a written petition and then send references. You can’t escape the responsibility to make your source code available to end-users.

Well, now you know about the basic license you will need for software distribution. And different types of opening source permit requires you to meet different kinds of obligations if you want to reuse the code. These licenses will help you in reusing and redistribution of the code or software without violation of the copyright. You need to have particular permission before using any software.