Permissive software license
free software license with minimal requirements about how the software can be redistributed
A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal requirements on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, usually including a warranty disclaimer. Examples include the GNU All-permissive License, MIT License, BSD licenses, Apple Public Source License and Apache license. As of 2016, the most popular free-software license is the permissive MIT license.
Comparison table
Example
The following is the full text of the simple GNU All-permissive License:
Copyright <YEAR>, <AUTHORS>Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty, provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved. This file is offered as-is, without any warranty.
Definitions
The Open Source Initiative defines a permissive software license as a "non-copyleft license that guarantees the freedoms to use, modify and redistribute". GitHub's choosealicense website describes the permissive MIT license as "[letting] people do anything they want with your code as long as they provide attribution back to you and don't hold you liable." California Western School of Law's newmediarights.com defined them as follows: "The 'BSD-like' licenses such as the BSD, MIT and Apache licenses are extremely permissive, requiring little more than attributing the original portions of the licensed code to the original developers in your own code and/or documentation."
Comparison to copyleft
Copyleft licenses generally require the reciprocal publication of the source code of any modified versions under the original work's copyleft license. Permissive licenses, in contrast, do not try to guarantee that modified versions of the software will remain free and publicly available, generally requiring only that the original copyright notice be retained. As a result, derivative works, or future versions, of permissively-licensed software can be released as proprietary software.
Defining how liberal a license is, however, is not something easily quantifiable, and often depends on the goals of the final users.
The public source identifies “Permissive software license” as free software license with minimal requirements about how the software can be redistributed. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Permissive, software and license.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Permissive software license”, the useful work is to connect “free software license with minimal requirements about how the software can be redistributed” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1437937. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2016.
Current terminology should not be projected backward without checking the classification used when the underlying evidence was created. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Permissive software license” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.