Figure 1.
Example of FOSS license with “academic” style copyright statement.
The example shown is the entirety of a 2-Clause BSD [8] license with copyright statement (at top, within quotes). The text of the license is in black. Red highlighted text is where the copyright holder applying the license inserts their specific information. Application of this and many FOSS licenses simply require that the text of the license be included (usually as “License.txt”) in the directory containing the distributed program binary and or source code.
Table 1.
Summary of select attributes of cited licenses types.
Figure 2.
Schematic representation of license directionality.
In general, permissively licensed code is forward compatible with any other license type. However, only permissive licenses, such as the BSD and MIT, can feed into other permissive licenses. Restrictive licenses like the GPL are backward compatible with themselves and permissive licenses, but must adopt the restrictive license from then on. Proprietary licenses can incorporate upstream permissively licensed code, but by definition are incompatible with any other downstream license. Grey represents actions that are not permitted without negotiating a separate license agreement with the rights owner.