License

A license is a legal contract that specifies the terms of use of something, like software or written content managed by its use.

There are many types of license. Private corporations write them to their own specifications, and may vary them per customer as well as per product. When a more predictable and easier to audit regime of contracts is required, there may be a parametric license applied with many "blanks" to fill in.Consortium licenses and some open source regimes rely on these relatively heavily. Shared source is also evolving in this direction.

The free software licenses are unique in that they try to be "one size fits all". This may be appropriate for very core and technically constrained elements such as an operating system, but few people think they apply well to all elements of a complex distributed system.