Public-domain equivalent license

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Public-domain equivalent licenses offer many of the same freedoms as releasing a work to the public domain. The permissive licenses used in free software are well-known examples, and include the MIT license and the BSD license. In contrast, copyleft free licenses like the GNU General Public License require copies and derivatives of the source code to be made available on terms no more restrictive than those of the original license.

Computer Associates Int'l v. Altai used the term "public domain" to refer to works that have become widely shared and distributed under permission, rather than work that was deliberately put into the public domain. The earliest licenses, like the license for the X Window System released by MIT in 1985, did not pretend to retain rights of any significance.

A public-domain equivalent license, if effective, is not actually equivalent to releasing a work into the public domain. But because the MIT and BSD licenses essentially retain no rights, the purported copyright holders would not be losing rights if a court held that the works were actually in the public domain.

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