The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own software without being required by the terms of a strong copyleft license to release the source code of their own components. However, any developer who modifies an LGPL-covered component is required to make their modified version available under the same LGPL license. For proprietary software, code under the LGPL is usually used in the form of a shared library, so that there is a clear separation between the proprietary and LGPL components. The LGPL is primarily used for software libraries, although it is also used by some stand-alone applications.
Qt is a cross-platform application development framework for creating graphical user interfaces as well as cross-platform applications that run on various software and hardware platforms such as Linux, Windows, macOS, Android or embedded systems with little or no change in the underlying codebase while still being a native application with native capabilities and speed.
XBasic is a variant of the BASIC programming language that was developed in the late 1980s for the Motorola 88000 CPU and Unix by Max Reason. In the early 1990s it was ported to Windows and Linux, and since 1999 it has been available as open source software with its runtime library under the LGPL license.
RAR is a proprietary archive file format that supports data compression, error correction and file spanning. It was developed in 1993 by Russian software engineer Eugene Roshal and the software is licensed by win.rar GmbH. The name RAR stands for Roshal Archive.
The Netscape Public License (NPL) is a free software license, the license under which Netscape Communications Corporation originally released Mozilla.
The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird. The MPL license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns of both open-source and proprietary developers. It is distinguished from others as a middle ground between the permissive software BSD-style licenses and the GNU General Public License. So under the terms of the MPL, it allows the integration of MPL-licensed code into proprietary codebases, but only on condition those components remain accessible.
Source-available software is software released through a source code distribution model that includes arrangements where the source can be viewed, and in some cases modified, but without necessarily meeting the criteria to be called open-source. The licenses associated with the offerings range from allowing code to be viewed for reference to allowing code to be modified and redistributed for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.
iText is a library for creating and manipulating PDF files in Java and .NET. It was created in 2000 and written by Bruno Lowagie. The source code was initially distributed as open source under the Mozilla Public License or the GNU Library General Public License open source licenses. However, as of version 5.0.0 and version 4.2.0 it is distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. A fork of the LGPL/MPL licensed version of iText is currently being actively maintained as the OpenPDF library on GitHub. iText is also available through a proprietary license, distributed by iText Software NV.
Lazarus is a cross-platform, integrated development environment (IDE) for rapid application development (RAD) using the Free Pascal compiler. Its goal is to provide an easy-to-use development environment for developing with the Object Pascal language, which is as close as possible to Delphi. It is free and open-source software with different parts released under different software licenses.
A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, usually including a warranty disclaimer. Examples include the GNU All-permissive License, MIT License, BSD licenses, Apple Public Source License and Apache license. As of 2016, the most popular free-software license is the permissive MIT license.
Open Cascade Technology (OCCT), formerly called CAS.CADE, is an open-source software development platform for 3D CAD, CAM, CAE, etc. that is developed and supported by Open Cascade SAS company.
Public-domain software is software that has been placed in the public domain, in other words, software for which there is absolutely no ownership such as copyright, trademark, or patent. Software in the public domain can be modified, distributed, or sold even without any attribution by anyone; this is unlike the common case of software under exclusive copyright, where licenses grant limited usage rights.
The Unarchiver is a proprietary freeware data decompression utility, which supports more formats than Archive Utility, the built-in archive unpacker program in macOS. It can also handle filenames in various character encodings, created using operating system versions that use those character encodings. The latest version requires Mac OS X Lion or higher. The Unarchiver does not compress files.
License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are commonly deliberately incompatible with proprietary licenses, in order to prevent copyleft software from being re-licensed under a proprietary license, turning it into proprietary software. Many copyleft licenses explicitly allow relicensing under some other copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses are compatible with everything, including proprietary licenses; there is thus no guarantee that all derived works will remain under a permissive license.
Companies whose business centers on the development of open-source software employ a variety of business models to solve the challenge of making profits from software that is under an open-source license. Each of these business strategies rest on the premise that users of open-source technologies are willing to purchase additional software features under proprietary licenses, or purchase other services or elements of value that complement the open-source software that is core to the business. This additional value can be, but not limited to, enterprise-grade features and up-time guarantees to satisfy business or compliance requirements, performance and efficiency gains by features not yet available in the open source version, legal protection, or professional support/training/consulting that are typical of proprietary software applications.
A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder of a piece of software can remove these restrictions by accompanying the software with a software license which grants the recipient these rights. Software using such a license is free software as conferred by the copyright holder. Free-software licenses are applied to software in source code and also binary object-code form, as the copyright law recognizes both forms.
BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD license was used for its namesake, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-like operating system. The original version has since been revised, and its descendants are referred to as modified BSD licenses.
The GNU General Public Licenses are a series of widely used free software licenses, or copyleft licenses, that guarantee end users the freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general use and was originally written by Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. The licenses in the GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely-used permissive software licenses such as BSD, MIT, and Apache.
Software relicensing is applied in open-source software development when software licenses of software modules are incompatible and are required to be compatible for a greater combined work. Licenses applied to software as copyrightable works, in source code as binary form, can contain contradictory clauses. These requirements can make it impossible to combine source code or content of several software works to create a new combined one.
