Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative both publish lists of licenses that they find to comply with their definition of free software and open-source software respectively.
- List of FSF approved software licences
- List of OSI approved software licences
These lists are necessarily incomplete, because a license need not be known by either organization in order to provide these freedoms.
Apart from these two organisations, the Debian project is seen by some to provide useful advice on whether particular licenses comply with their Debian Free Software Guidelines. Debian doesn't publish a list of approved licenses, so its judgements have to be tracked by checking what software they have allowed into their software archives. That is summarized at the Debian web site.
However, it is rare that a license is announced as being in-compliance by FSF or OSI and not the other (the Netscape Public License used for early versions of Mozilla being an exception), so exact definitions of the terms have not become hot issues.
Most free software uses a small set of licenses. The most popular of these are:
- the GNU General Public License
- the GNU Lesser General Public License
- the BSD License
- the Mozilla Public License
- the MIT License
- the Apache License
All free software licences must grant people all the freedoms discussed above. However, unless the applications' licences are compatible, combining programs by mixing source code or directly linking binaries is problematic, because of licence technicalities. Programs indirectly connected together may avoid this problem.
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