List of Software Licenses

List Of Software Licenses

In computing, software that is copyrighted and licensed under a software license is done under a variety of licensing schemes. For end-users there are various licenses ranging from very restrictive proprietary licenses to open-source licenses.

There are also different licensing schemes for access to and use of source code. To address special intellectual property issues regarding source code, open-source licenses, and special licenses, such as copyleft, have been created.

Not all software is licensed, or even copyrighted, and this article is thus not an exhaustive list of the terms under which software is available in the market. Software may be published without an accompanying license, as License-Free Software, in which case it remains copyrighted, its distribution is subject to ordinary copyright law, and its sale is subject to ordinary sales law. In some countries, software may also be released to the public domain, in which case it is not copyrighted and the notion of a copyright license simply does not apply at all (although the other parts of a software licence, including warranty provisions, will still apply to the sale of such software).