Software licencing falls into the categories of proprietary, free software or open source, each one has its own distinguishing features which affects the rights of an end user.
Proprietary licenses allow a licensee to use of one or more copies of their software while they retain full ownership of any and all copies. This leaves only a very small and very limited set of rights for the user, and even these are well defined and contain many terms which categorically prohibit certain types of use, even those which would normally be allowed under copyright laws.
The end user has to accept this licence, if they don’t they will not be able, or allowed to use the software. Proprietary licenses contain extensive lists of retricted activities such as simultaneous use by multiple users or publishing performance tests.
Free software licenses allow ownership of the copy to be held by the end user.
This means that they afford all rights to the software by copyright law to the copy owner, but this is not the same as copyright owner. Free software licences grant extra rights to the user which would normally be reserved by the publisher of the software, and the user may use the software without accepting the licence, but if they want to redistribute they have to accept and adhere to the software licence.
Open source licences fall into two categories. While one attempts to preserve the freedom of the software, the other aims to give freedom to the users of the software. This is called permissive licences. Open source licencing is aimed at giving the user permissions to redistribute, engineer or even modify the software.
