copyleft

noun

Etymology

A pun on copyright, which refers to using copyright laws for purposes that are in some ways contrary to copyright's original intent.

Definitions

  1. The philosophy of using copyrights to enforce freedom of information, especially software…

    The philosophy of using copyrights to enforce freedom of information, especially software source code.

    • They believe in copyleft because they want their software to be used freely by anyone.
  2. A software license that follows this philosophy.

    • I have placed my program under copyleft.
    • The GNU General Public License is a copyleft licence.
  3. To license under a copyleft license.

    • Linus Torvalds copylefted the Linux kernel.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for copyleft. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA