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License Compatibility
License compatibility is a legal framework that allows for pieces of software with different software licenses to be distributed together. The need for such a framework arises because the different licenses can contain contradictory requirements, rendering it impossible to legally combine source code from separately-licensed software in order to create and publish a new program. Proprietary licenses are generally program-specific and incompatible; authors must negotiate to combine code. Copyleft licenses are commonly deliberately incompatible with proprietary licenses, in order to prevent copyleft software from being re-licensed under a proprietary license, turning it into proprietary software. Many copyleft licenses explicitly allow relicensing under some other copyleft licenses. Permissive licenses are (with minor exceptions) compatible with everything, including proprietary licenses; there is thus no guarantee that all derived works will remain under a permissive license. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Software License
A software license is a legal instrument governing the use or redistribution of software. Since the 1970s, software copyright has been recognized in the United States. Despite the copyright being recognized, most companies prefer to sell licenses rather than copies of the software because it enables them to enforce stricter terms on redistribution. Very few purchasers read any part of the license, initially shrink-wrap contracts and now most commonly encountered as clickwrap or browsewrap. The enforceability of this kind of license is a matter of controversy and is limited in some jurisdictions. Service-level agreements are another type of software license where the vendor agrees to provide a level of service to the purchaser, often backed by financial penalties. Copyleft is a type of license that mandates derivative works to be licensed under the license's terms. Copyleft licenses exist for free and open-source software, but also for commercial applications like the Ser ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kernel Space
A modern computer operating system usually uses virtual memory to provide separate address spaces or regions of a single address space, called user space and kernel space. This separation primarily provides memory protection and hardware protection from malicious or errant software behaviour. Kernel space is strictly reserved for running a privileged operating system kernel, kernel extensions, and most device drivers. In contrast, user space is the memory area where application software and some drivers execute, typically with one address space per process. Overview The term user space (or userland) refers to all code that runs outside the operating system's kernel. User space usually refers to the various programs and libraries that the operating system uses to interact with the kernel: software that performs input/output, manipulates file system objects, application software, etc. Each user space process usually runs in its own virtual memory space, and, unless explici ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linker (computing)
A linker or link editor is a computer program that combines intermediate software build files such as object file, object and library (computing), library files into a single executable file such as a program or library. A linker is often part of a toolchain that includes a compiler and/or assembler (computing), assembler that generates intermediate files that the linker processes. The linker may be integrated with other toolchain development tool, tools such that the user does not interact with the linker directly. A simpler version that writes its Input/output, output directly to Computer memory, memory is called the ''loader'', though loader (computing), loading is typically considered a separate process. Overview Computer programs typically are composed of several parts or modules; these parts/modules do not need to be contained within a single object file, and in such cases refer to each other using symbol (computing), symbols as addresses into other modules, which are ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free And Open-source Software
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free software and open-source software. The rights guaranteed by FOSS originate from the "Four Essential Freedoms" of '' The Free Software Definition'' and the criteria of '' The Open Source Definition''. All FOSS can have publicly available source code, but not all source-available software is FOSS. FOSS is the opposite of proprietary software, which is licensed restrictively or has undisclosed source code. The historical precursor to FOSS was the hobbyist and academic public domain software ecosystem of the 1960s to 1980s. Free and open-source operating systems such as Linux distributions and descendants of BSD are widely used, powering millions of servers, desktops, smartphones, and other devices. Free-software licenses and open-so ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Open-source License
Open-source licenses are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified, and shared. They facilitate free and open-source software (FOSS) development. Intellectual property (IP) laws restrict the modification and sharing of creative works. Free and open-source licenses use these existing legal structures for an inverse purpose. They Grant (law), grant the recipient the rights to use the software, examine the source code, modify it, and distribute the modifications. These criteria are outlined in the Open Source Definition. After 1980, the United States began to treat software as a literary work covered by copyright law. Richard Stallman founded the free software movement in response to the rise of proprietary software. The term "open source" was used by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), founded by free software developers Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond. "Open source" emphasizes the strengths of the Open-source software development, open development model rather tha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Loadable Kernel Module
A loadable kernel module (LKM) is an executable library that extends the capabilities of a running kernel, or so-called ''base kernel'', of an operating system. LKMs are typically used to add support for new hardware (as device drivers) and/or filesystems, or for adding system calls. When the functionality provided by an LKM is no longer required, it can be unloaded in order to free memory and other resources. Most current Unix-like systems and Windows support loadable kernel modules but with different names, such as kernel loadable module (kld) in FreeBSD, kernel extension (kext) in macOS (although support for third-party modules is being dropped), kernel extension module in AIX, dynamically loadable kernel module in HP-UX, kernel-mode driver in Windows NT and downloadable kernel module (DKM) in VxWorks. They are also known as kernel loadable module (KLM), or simply as kernel module (KMOD). Advantages Without loadable kernel modules, an operating system would have to inc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Software Freedom Conservancy
Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. (also known as "Conservancy") is an organization that provides a Nonprofit organization, non-profit home, infrastructure support, and legal support for free software, free and open source software projects. The organization was established in 2006, and as of June 2022, had over 40 member projects. History In 2007, Conservancy started coordinating GNU General Public License copyright enforcement, compliance and enforcement actions, primarily for the BusyBox project. In October 2010, Conservancy hired its first executive director, Bradley M. Kuhn and a year later, its first General Counsel, Tony Sebro. In May 2012, Conservancy took on GPL compliance and enforcement for several other member projects, as well as for a number of individual Linux kernel developers. In March 2014, Conservancy appointed Karen Sandler as its Executive Director, with Bradley M. Kuhn taking on the role as Distinguished Technologist. In February 2015, the Outreachy prog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Red Hat
Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become associated to a large extent with its enterprise operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With the acquisition of open-source enterprise middleware vendor JBoss, Red Hat also offers Red Hat Virtualization (RHV), an enterprise virtualization product. Red Hat provides storage, operating system platforms, middleware, applications, management products, support, training, and consulting services. Red Hat creates, maintains, and contributes to many free software projects. It has acquired the codebases of several proprietary software products through corporate mergers and acquisitions, and has released such software under open source licenses. , Red Hat is the second largest co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linux Kernel
The Linux kernel is a Free and open-source software, free and open source Unix-like kernel (operating system), kernel that is used in many computer systems worldwide. The kernel was created by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU operating system (OS) which was created to be a free software, free replacement for Unix. Since the late 1990s, it has been included in many Linux distributions, operating system distributions, many of which are called Linux. One such Linux kernel operating system is Android (operating system), Android which is used in many mobile and embedded devices. Most of the kernel code is written in C (programming language), C as supported by the GNU compiler collection (GCC) which has extensions beyond standard C. The code also contains assembly language, assembly code for architecture-specific logic such as optimizing memory use and task execution. The kernel has a Modular programming, modular design such that modules can be inte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Binary Blob
In the context of free and open-source software, proprietary software only available as a binary executable is referred to as a blob or binary blob. The term usually refers to a device driver module loaded into the kernel of an open-source operating system, and is sometimes also applied to code running outside the kernel, such as system firmware images, microcode updates, or userland programs. The term '' blob'' was first used in database management systems to describe a collection of binary data stored as a single entity. When computer hardware vendors provide complete technical documentation for their products, operating system developers are able to write hardware device drivers to be included in the operating system kernels. However, some vendors, such as Nvidia, do not provide complete documentation for some of their products and instead provide binary-only drivers. This practice is most common for accelerated graphics drivers, wireless networking devices, and ha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
