7. Impact of copyleft on license choice

Copyright and copyleft

Copyright exist to protect authors of intellectual property from unauthorized copying and/or selling of their work. Copyleft makes it possible to modify and distribute software or documentation to the community, but only on the condition that modified software remains Libre*. 

*This means that the product is free and cannot be commercialized.


There are several types of copyleft licenses that vary in strength. We will give an example of Strong, Medium, Weak and Free license.

• One of the strongest licenses is GNU APGL. The product can be redistributed for free, it can be used an unlimited number of times, the product must be open source, and this license must be extended to all derivative modifications of the product.  This license is used by programs such as MediaGoblin and CKAN

• When it comes to licenses of "medium" strength, the license first comes to mind is GNU GPL. This license is very similar to the GNU AGPL, but if the program provides online support, you do not need to publish its source code. This type of license is very popular and is used by programs such as Adblock Plus, Audacity and Notepad++.

• A very popular "weak" license is GNU LGPL. This license is special in that it works for the product, but any derivative, "modified" version of the product will be free from any license. This type of license is used by FFMpeg (But some parts of FFMPEG protected by GNU license) and VLC media player

•Last, but not least license is BSD license, it is one of the most "free" license types. One of the most popular BSD-like license is MIT license (example of MIT license) this type of license is very important, because any code based on the licensed product can be used for commercial purposes. For example, Google and Facebook have hosted their front-end frameworks under this license (Angular and React frameworks).

based on the above examples and explanations you can understand why certain companies used a certain type of copyleft license. For example, you should not distribute a program under a BSD license if you do not want to see it in commercial areas. Therefore, choosing the right license can be as important as the program itself.


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