Open source software licenses

A software license is an agreement between a copyright holder and a recipient of the software. Modern copyright laws are designed to give authors complete control over the use and distribution of their work – copyright automatically exists from the moment a piece of work is fixed on any medium and no one can use or copy that work without explicit permission from the author. Thus, a license agreement is required to grant a user some of the permissions that are reserved for the author by default. Authors are free to specify any conditions, and many individuals and companies use that to restrict what users can do – for example, only permit non-commercial use. A license agreement is also normally made between an author or a copyright holder and a specific person.

However, in the late 1980s, programmers and lawyers came up with the idea to use authors’ unlimited control over their works to ensure that anyone can use, distribute, and modify them rather than prevent that. They introduced public licenses, which grant permissions to everyone rather than just people who signed or otherwise accepted the agreement, and wrote several reusable license agreements that anyone could apply to their software. That concept became known as copyleft – a reversal of copyright. Those licenses became known as open source licenses because they explicitly permit the distribution and modification of software source code.

All the classic licenses were born in that period: the MIT license, the BSD license, the GNU GPL, and the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License (LGPL). None of those licenses limit users’ rights to use software distributed under them. Conditions, if any, apply only to the distribution and modification of executables and source code.

Permissive and copyleft licenses

When it comes to distribution, two schools of thought differ in their approach to distribution conditions.

Proponents of permissive licenses believe that recipients of software must have absolute freedom to do anything with it, even to incorporate it into other software that isn’t open source or to create closed source derivatives. The MIT and BSD licenses are typical examples of permissive open source licenses.

Proponents of copyleft believe that it’s important to protect open source software from attempts to appropriate the work of its authors and create a closed source derivative. The GNU GPL is the purest example of this – if anyone distributes executables of programs under the GPL or programs that link with libraries under the GPL, they must also distribute the source code of that program under that license. This is the most radical approach and is known as strong copyleft.

Licenses that allow you to link libraries to programs under any other license but require library code modifications to be under the same license are known as weak copyleft licenses. The most widely used example is the GNU LGPL.

Patent grant, tivoization, and SaaS concerns

The GNU GPL was created as a response to the rise of proprietary software distributed without source code, which prevented end users from improving it and sharing their improvements. However, the software industry is evolving, and new trends are appearing that some see as threats to the existence or financial sustainability of open source software.

One such threat is patent trolling – the use of software patents (in jurisdictions where they exist) in bad faith. As a response to it, some newer licenses and new versions of old licenses, such as the Apache license and the GNU GPLv3, introduced a patent grant clause. Such a clause prevents contributors to the source code of software from making patent claims against its users. If they make such legal threats, their licenses are revoked.

A more controversial point of the GPLv3 is its attempts to protect users’ rights to run modified versions on their hardware. The practice of preventing hardware from running custom software through digital signatures and similar mechanisms is sometimes called tivoization, after a Linux-based digital video recorder named TiVo that was an early example of such lock-in. While some projects supported the idea to prevent it, for others, the GPLv3 clause was a reason not to switch from GPLv2 – the Linux kernel is among those projects that stayed at the old GPL version.

Finally, all classic licenses were written in a time when all software was deployed on-premises, while in the modern world, a lot of software is delivered over a network and its executables aren’t accessible to end users – an approach known as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Since the GPL says that every recipient of a binary executable is entitled to receive its source code, it does not apply to SaaS since the user never receives any executables. This allows vendors to create modified versions of the software under the GPL without sharing their improvements with the community. Several licenses were developed in response to that trend, such as the Affero GPL.

In the last few years, big technology companies that provide hosted versions of open source software started to be seen as undermining project maintainers’ ability to earn money from services since it’s very difficult to compete on price with effective monopolies. In response, some projects started switching to licenses that have restrictions on usage, which many argue are no longer open source licenses, even though the source code is still available. The future of such licenses is an open question.