W3C Software Notice and License

Last updated
W3C Software Notice and License
Author World Wide Web Consortium
Latest version20021231
Published31 December 2002;16 years ago (2002-12-31)
DFSG compatibleYes [1]
FSF approved Yes
OSI approved Yes [2]
GPL compatible Yes [3]
Copyleft No
Linking from code with a different license Yes

The W3C Software Notice and License is a permissive free software license used by software released by the World Wide Web Consortium, like Amaya. The license is a permissive license, compatible with the GNU General Public License.

World Wide Web Consortium web standards organization

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded and currently led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations which maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the World Wide Web. As of 29 May 2019, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has 444 members. The W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software and serves as an open forum for discussion about the Web.

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.

GNU General Public License set of free software licenses

The GNU General Public License is a widely-used free software license, which guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software. The license was originally written by Richard Stallman, former head of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), for the GNU Project, and grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. The GPL is a copyleft license, which means that derivative work must be open-source and distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD licenses and the MIT License are widely-used less-restrictive examples. GPL was the first copyleft license for general use.

Contents

Software using the License

See also

Related Research Articles

MIT License Permissive free software license

The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, reasonable license compatibility. The MIT license permits reuse within proprietary software provided that all copies of the licensed software include a copy of the MIT License terms and the copyright notice. The MIT license is also compatible with many copyleft licenses, such as the GNU General Public License (GPL); MIT licensed software can be integrated into GPL software, but not the other way around.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML-based vector image format for two-dimensional graphics with support for interactivity and animation. The SVG specification is an open standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) since 1999.

An open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has various rights to use associated with it, and may also have various properties of how it was designed. There is no single definition and interpretations vary with usage.

Amaya (web editor) Web browser and web editor

Amaya is a discontinued free and open source WYSIWYG web authoring tool with browsing abilities.

A testbed is a platform for conducting rigorous, transparent, and replicable testing of scientific theories, computational tools, and new technologies.

Website builders are tools that typically allow the construction of websites without manual code editing. They fall into two categories:

A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license with minimal requirements about how the software can be redistributed. Examples include the 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.

libwww is a modular client-side web API for Unix and Windows. It is also the name of the reference implementation of the libwww API.

HTML Tidy is a console application for correcting invalid hypertext markup language (HTML), detecting potential web accessibility errors, and for improving the layout and indent style of the resulting markup. It is also a cross-platform library for computer applications that provides HTML Tidy's features.

The ISC license is a permissive free software license published by the Internet Software Consortium, nowadays called Internet Systems Consortium (ISC). It is functionally equivalent to the simplified BSD and MIT licenses, but without language deemed unnecessary following the Berne Convention.

WTFPL License for permissive use of intellectual property rights

WTFPL is a GPL-compatible permissive license most commonly used as a free software license. As a public domain like license, the WTFPL is essentially the same as dedication to the public domain. It allows redistribution and modification of the work under any terms. The title is an abbreviation of "Do what the fuck you want to Public License".

HTML5 Fifth and current version of the hypertext markup language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web

HTML5 is a software solution stack that defines the properties and behaviors of web page content by implementing a markup based pattern to it.

Free software license license allowing software modification and redistribution

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.

SVG animation

Animation of Scalable Vector Graphics, an open XML-based standard vector graphics format, is possible through various means:

CERN httpd

CERN httpd is an early, now discontinued, web server (HTTP) daemon originally developed at CERN from 1990 onwards by Tim Berners-Lee, Ari Luotonen and Henrik Frystyk Nielsen. Implemented in C, it was the first ever web server software.

Arena (web browser) Web browser and Web authoring tool for Unix

The Arena browser was one of the first web browsers for Unix. Originally created by Dave Raggett in 1993, the browser continued its development at CERN and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and subsequently by Yggdrasil Computing. As a testbed browser, Arena was used in testing the implementation for HTML version 3.0, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Portable Network Graphics (PNG), and libwww. Arena was widely used and popular at the beginning of the World Wide Web.

BaseX

BaseX is a native and light-weight XML database management system and XQuery processor, developed as a community project on GitHub. It is specialized in storing, querying, and visualizing large XML documents and collections. BaseX is platform-independent and distributed under a permissive free software license.

References

  1. Debian (18 February 2009), License information , retrieved 27 February 2009
  2. Open Source Initiative (18 September 2006), Licenses by Name , retrieved 27 February 2009
  3. Free Software Foundation (20 February 2009), Licenses , retrieved 27 February 2009