This level of sharing is required to ensure the openness of the software. When you improve upon the source code and it benefits your company, you have to give it back to the community. Nonpermissive licenses guarantee the freedom of developers and end-users. It is the most widely used nonpermissive license. An example of a nonpermissive license is the General Public License (GPL) that ensures users have the freedom and responsibility to share their changes with the community. Software that comes with nonpermissive licenses enforces freedom with software. What this means is that no one outside of the company can access the “open source” software, so it is essentially closed source software. An organization that uses permissive-license open source in a product could deploy that software behind some form of digital rights management (DRM) regulation. Under this license, people change the code, rebrand it, and never have to give attribution to the software provider. It is the most popular and widely used permissive license. An example of this type of license is the Apache 2.0 license by the Apache Software Foundation. Permissive licensing is a form of open source licensing that allows a person or company to use that software to create products that require a paid license. With all this in mind, which open source license is right for your organization? Software License Types for Open Source Permissive Licensing If you’re already running open source, run an audit of your running projects and determine which licenses you’re currently under before adding another. Organizations often utilize several types of open source software with different types of licenses. There are almost 100 licenses that the Open Source Initiative has approved. The Open Source Initiative (a non-profit organization) determines licenses have authority. All software (even open source software) that is going to be public needs to be governed by a license that protects the copyright holders of the code.

Open source licenses set the conditions of how software code can be shared and the level to which the authors are protected. Open source licenses are licenses that comply with the terms of open source software. Here, we break down your open source licensing options. There's more than one type of open source license.

Open source license manager