Licence families

Understand how OpenText Core SCA defines different open-source license families.

At OpenText Core SCA, we group licenses into different license families, applicable to different use cases. They are shown in one of the columns in the License view and can be used in your customized automation rules. Here’s how we categorize them:

Proprietary

A non-free license, or proprietary license, allows the owner to restrict the use, modification, and redistribution of the software.

Permissive

A permissive software license, also known as BSD-style license, is a "free software" license that, compared to copyleft, only has minimal restrictions on how to use, modify and redistribute the software. The best-known permissive licenses are BSD Licenses, Apache Licenses, such as Apache License 2.0 (Apache-2.0), and MIT License.

Strong copyleft

In the family of strong copyleft licenses, regulations can be imposed on all derived works, meaning that the original creator of the works has the most rights. One of the best-known strong copyleft licenses is the GNU General Public Licenses, such as GNU General Public License v3.0 only (GPL-3.0-only). Strong copyleft licenses are also applicable to art, music, sports, photography, and video.

Weak copyleft

Weak copyleft licenses refer to licenses where not all derived work inherits the copyleft license. Instead, it depends on how the work was derived. Weak copyleft licenses are mostly used for software libraries by allowing links to other libraries. Known examples of these are the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0), and GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only (LGPL-3.0-only). The best-known products with weak copyright are Mozilla and OpenOffice.org.

Public domain

Software placed in the public domain does not have a copyright, trademark, or patent. The software may be freely distributed, modified, or sold.