Software Licensing

A software license is a legal permit to control the use or handling of the software. Most of the software can be categorized by its license. the particular license agreement explains to the user how they can use the software. All software must be legally licensed before it started to be used.

As we discussed earlier licenses can be categorized by their characteristics. Here are five types of software licenses.

1. Public domain
   This is a very common type of software license. if a license is in public domain then anyone can use and modify the given software without any restrictions. A Software without a license doesn’t mean that is in a public domain because it must have public domain based license to be in that domain.
2. Permissive
   These types of licenses are also known as “Apache Style” or “BSD Style”. These types of licenses have minimal restrictions to modify or redistribute a software. This type of software license is so popular because they used with free and open source software.
3. LGPL
   LGPL means lesser General Public License. The LGPL allows us to link open source libraries in our software. If you simply link an LGPL licensed library with your code then you can use your software under any license you want. But you can’t modify or copy the libraries into your own code but if you do it then you have to release your software under the same terms as the LGPL.
4. Copyleft
   This license allows you to change the modified code and distribute new works based on it. This license type is also called as reciprocal licenses or restrictive licenses. what this really means is that the users of this software also have the rights to modify the code. therefore, You have to make your source code available.
5. Proprietary
   Of all types of software licenses, this is the most restrictive. The idea behind it is that all rights are reserved. It’s generally used for proprietary software where the work may not be modified or redistributed.

Businesses must be knowledgable in the licenses they purchase to confirm that they are using software legally and they aren’t paying for licenses that aren’t being used. getting too many licenses is wasting the company resources, without enough you leave yourself liable to a potential lawsuit. Finding the right license agreement can also make it easier to manage software in your company

Before you decide what type of license your code has to get, you need to create a list of components that have been used in your code. So, you need to do a software composition analysis tool to generate the list faster. So, the type of license which you want to get for your software depends on your decisions and the software components.