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Week 6: Copyleft


Continuing on the topic of copyright issues, this week's post will be about Copyleft and what impact it has on choosing a software license for one's project. 

So first of all, what even is Copyleft? Some of you might have heard of this term before in association with open-source software. Well, it's a license for free content/software that determines whether or not the derived works are influenced by the license or not. In contrast to copyright, copyleft ensures that the code/content is freely available for use and modification, whereas copyright more restricts uses. 

There are three different grades of copyleft:

Strong copyleft - one of the most famous examples is definitely GNU GPL, which was also the first copyleft license. This basically means that the license applies to all derived works and you are obligated to publish the source code if you distribute code that was derived from theirs.

Weak copyleft - an example of this would be GNU Lesser General Public License. This license isn't as strongly restricted but it still leaves some rights to the developers of the main source code. With these licenses, the license doesn't apply to all derived work. Weak copyleft licenses are usually used for software libraries. Mozilla for example is a user of weak copyleft.

Non-copyleft - examples of this would be Apache, MIT, and the BSD licenses. These are pretty simple and also give developers the most freedom. This usually doesn't require you to distribute source code as the author doesn't want ownership over the work.

So when choosing a software license before starting your project, you should really think through what you want the future conditions for the project to be. Whether you want others to be able to contribute to it and help develop it further under the condition that they refer to your source code, or you don't care who does what with your code, I think copyleft gives developers a lot of good options.


Sources:

https://opensource.com/resources/what-is-copyleft

https://choosealicense.com/licenses/

https://e7.pngegg.com/pngimages/871/683/png-clipart-copyleft-free-art-license-copyright-on-off-words-phrases-copyright.png

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