A software license is a legal instrument (usually by way of contract law, with or without printed material) governing the use or redistribution of software. All software is copyright protected, except material in the public domain. Contractual confidentiality is another way of protecting software. A typical software license grants an end-user permission to use one or more copies of software in ways where such a use would otherwise potentially constitute copyright infringement of the software owner's exclusive rights under copyright law.
In addition to granting rights and imposing restrictions on the use of software, software licenses typically contain provisions which allocate liability and responsibility between the parties entering into the license agreement. In enterprise and commercial software transactions these terms, such as limitations of liability, warranties and warranty disclaimers, and indemnity if the software infringes intellectual property rights of others.
Software licenses can generally be fit into the following categories: proprietary licenses and free and open source. The significant feature that distinguishes them are the terms which the end-user's might further distribute or copy the software.
Read more about Software License: Software Licenses and Copyright Law, Proprietary Software Licenses, Free and Open-source Software Licenses
Famous quotes containing the word license:
“My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)