What is copyleft?

Copyleft is something that I had not heard of before having to write about it for this blog post, and had always just assumed that what I know now as copyleft had fallen under one of the many different copyright licenses, but in reality copyleft is actually its own branch that covers a surprisingly large amount of software that I interact with! Copyright is mainly used as protection for the creator of work, so that someone doesn’t simply steal it, while copyleft is intended to protect the general public from projects abusing free and open source code for their own profits, in general it allows projects and companies to use free and open source code as long as their project also ends up being open source.


Copyleft is primarily divided into three parts:


Strong copyleft, as described in the name, that if you were to take some software that is covered by strong copyleft and used it in your project, then you would be responsible for publishing what you had created to the public, as now your creation is also covered by strong copyleft. An example of a strong copyleft license is GPL.


Then there is the weak copyleft, also as stated in the name it is “weaker” then the strong copyleft, meaning that if unlike in the situation with strong copyleft where you would have to publish your work as it uses a work that is covered by copyleft, in the case of weak copyleft there are guideline where you would not need to publish your work. An example of a weak copyleft license is LGPL


And finally non-copyleft or permissive, basically do anything you want to the code and nobody will hold you responsible for it. It allows companies and projects to take code, and not have to share their code basically unconditionally. A good example of non-copyleft or permissive license is MIT.


Now you might be wondering, what type of license do I choose for my project? Now as a person who use the internet daily and want it to grow and get better I would want you to choose the strong copyleft, so that the net of open source keeps growing and expanding, but the most likely scenario is that a project will choose either the weak copyleft or the non-copyleft/permissive, as not many companies and projects want their hard work to be available for free to the people, so most will choose a license that will allow them to use open source projects, while still giving them the ability to avoid having to publish their work to the public.


Sources:
  •     https://wiki.itcollege.ee/index.php/E-SPEAIT_T6_Computers_and_Laws_II
  •     https://resources.whitesourcesoftware.com/blog-whitesource/open-source-copyleft-licenses
  •     https://levelup.gitconnected.com/understanding-open-source-license-types-5a577c4a09d5
  •     https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html
  •     https://www.gnu.org/gwm/libredocxml/x53.html

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