Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

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Key definition

Open source software definition

What does Open source software mean? In legal practice, open source software describes software made available in source-code form under licences that permit use, copying, modification, compilation and redistribution, typically without licence fees. It is not defined in UK or Irish statute or case law; the term is descriptive and aligns with the Open Source Initiative’s Open Source Definition. The governing rules are set by the licence. Permissive licences (e.g., MIT, BSD, Apache 2.0) allow broad reuse subject to retention of notices and attribution, often with an express patent licence and a warranty/liability disclaimer. Copyleft licences (e.g., GPL, LGPL, AGPL) require that modified or combined works...

GPL 2.0: section-by-section legal commentary on copyleft, distribution, source code, patents and termination, with English law considerations and comparison with GPL 3.0

Published by a LexisNexis TMT expert

Practice notes

While its prominence has dipped in recent years as developers opt for permissive licences like MIT, and notwithstanding the release of a newer edition—the GNU GPL 3.0—a large body of code is still governed by GPL 2.0. Alongside GNU GPL 3.0, it remains a contentious and much-debated licence, chiefly due to copyleft effects that clash with prevailing commercial software licensing models. Under GPL 2.0, any work that is distributed or made public which, in whole or in part, includes or is derived from the GPL programme, or any portion of it, must be licensed in its entirety, free of charge, to all Third parties. Among other obligations, this means recipients must be permitted to copy, alter, and share the work, and the Licensee must provide access to the source code. There is extensive argument about the events that trigger this clause. In particular, the scope of ‘distribute’ and the precise moment when software ‘contains or is derived from’ the GPL-covered code. This Practice Note reproduces the text of GPL 2.0 and draws out the principal issues. Note that American spellings are used when quoting US sources or when naming a particular licence and applied strictly within that quoted source context...

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Web page updated on 21/05/2026

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