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Copyfree

Programming På svenska → Updated: 2026-11-02

A licensing philosophy and certification that only accepts licenses with no copyleft strings attached.

The Copyfree Initiative started in 2007 as a pushback against both the Free Software Foundation and the OSI counting copyleft as a form of freedom. The copyfree view is the reverse: requiring redistribution under the same license is a restriction, however well meant. Approved licenses may at most require that the copyright notice travels with the code and that no warranty is implied. The list includes permissive staples such as MIT, ISC and the Unlicense; the GPL is out by definition.

In practice copyfree is more a philosophical badge than a legal category. The line between permissive and copyfree is thin, but the term makes one thing explicit: "free" means different things depending on whose freedom you're counting.

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