> /v1/glossary/permissive-license · CONCEPT
Permissive License
A license category that allows derivative works to be relicensed under any terms — including proprietary.
A permissive open source license imposes minimal restrictions on how the code can be reused. The major permissive licenses are MIT, Apache 2.0, BSD (2-clause and 3-clause), and ISC. They allow:
- Commercial use - Modification - Distribution (including in proprietary products) - Private use
The only requirements are typically attribution (preserve copyright + license notices) and, in some cases, no use of the original author's name in marketing.
Permissive licenses are the easy default for libraries — they maximize adoption. The downside (from the original author's perspective) is that cloud providers can take permissively-licensed code, package it as a managed service, and out-compete the original maintainers without contributing back.
This dynamic drove the recent wave of relicensing — Elastic, MongoDB, Redis, HashiCorp, Sentry — moving from permissive to copyleft (AGPL, SSPL) or source-available (BSL).
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