open-source-licenses
Safeguard articles tagged "open-source-licenses" — guides, analysis, and best practices for software supply chain and application security.
8 articles
Types of Open Source Licenses
A breakdown of permissive, copyleft, and source-available license types—MIT, GPL, AGPL, SSPL—and why misclassified licenses create hidden supply chain risk.
What Is License Contamination?
One GPL dependency in the wrong place can put your proprietary source code under copyleft obligations. How license contamination happens and how to prevent it.
GNU GPL Explained: Versions, Obligations, and Compatibility
GPLv2 vs GPLv3, what the copyleft obligation actually requires, why 'GPLv2 or later' matters, and which licenses you can and cannot combine with the GPL.
Apache License 2.0 Explained: Permissions, Conditions, and Commercial Use
What the Apache License 2.0 lets you do, what it requires (attribution, NOTICE, change marking), and why its patent grant matters for commercial software.
Copyleft Licenses: Strong vs Weak, and Why It Matters
Copyleft licenses aren't one category — the gap between GPL-style strong copyleft and LGPL-style weak copyleft decides whether linking a library obligates you to open your own code.
What Is a Copyleft License?
Copyleft licenses grant broad rights on one condition: derivative works must stay under the same terms. Here is how strong and weak copyleft differ, and what actually triggers the obligation.
Software License Types: The Complete Guide
Permissive, copyleft, proprietary, and public domain: how the main software license types differ, what each one obligates you to do, and how to pick one for your project.
The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL), Explained
The GNU Affero General Public License closes the SaaS loophole in the GPL — if your service runs modified AGPL code over a network, you owe the source, even without distributing a binary.