A permissive software license, sometimes also called BSD-like or BSD-style license, is a free-software license which instead of copyleft protections, carries only minimal restrictions on how the software can be used, modified, and redistributed, usually including a warranty disclaimer. Examples include the GNU All-permissive License, MIT License, BSD licenses, Apple Public Source License and Apache license. the most popular free-software license is the permissive MIT license.
The following is the full text of the simple GNU All-permissive License:
Copyright , Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty, provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved. This file is offered as-is, without any warranty.
The Open Source Initiative defines a permissive software license as a "non-copyleft license that guarantees the freedoms to use, modify and redistribute". GitHub's choosealicense website describes the permissive MIT license as "[letting] people do anything they want with your code as long as they provide attribution back to you and don't hold you liable." California Western School of Law's newmediarights.com defined them as follows: "The 'BSD-like' licenses such as the BSD, MIT and Apache licenses are extremely permissive, requiring little more than attributing the original portions of the licensed code to the original developers in your own code and/or documentation."
Copyleft licenses generally require the reciprocal publication of the source code of any modified versions under the original work's copyleft license. Permissive licenses, in contrast, do not try to guarantee that modified versions of the software will remain free and publicly available, generally requiring only that the original copyright notice be retained. As a result, derivative works, or future versions, of permissively-licensed software can be released as proprietary software.
Defining how liberal a license is, however, is not something easily quantifiable, and often depends on the goals of the final users.