Please see our guidelines for licensing and copyright attribution (which are there solely to make our life easier). There is no requirement to assign your copyright to anyone in order to get your code included into LibreOffice - all contributions are welcome, but we do ask that you license your code to us jointly under both the Mozilla Public License v2 and the GNU Lesser GPL v3+ licenses. You are encouraged to refer to the LICENSE file in three formats (text, flat ODF and HTML) inside an installation, or use the Help, License Information dialog while running the software for further information. It is based on code from Apache OpenOffice made available under the Apache License 2.0 but also includes software which differs from version to version under a large variety of other Open Source licenses. LibreOffice is made available subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License v2.0 which is reproduced below. James Bond’s famous license to kill isn’t figurative or metaphorical-he literally has permission to kill people if he considers it necessary to complete a mission (in fact, that’s what it means to have “double-0” status in the books and movies in which Agent 007 appears).LibreOffice is Free Software. License is sometimes used in a figurative sense, as in poetic license, which is the freedom of artists to change something for effect, even if it’s not correct or realistic. Though license is most commonly used in an official sense, it can be used generally to mean “permission” or “authority,” as in Your promotion doesn’t give you a license to be rude to your coworkers. For example, in the United States, restaurants need a license to serve alcohol.

It’s not only individual people who can hold licenses-some organizations and businesses require licenses, too. In some places, you need a hunting license or a fishing license. There are many other examples of professions that require licenses, and there are also licenses for recreational activities. The same thing goes for many licenses, including those to practice law or medicine-you have to prove that you have the knowledge or skill necessary to do those things, because otherwise you could seriously hurt people or mess up their lives. In most places, you have to earn that permission by taking a test and proving that you’re a good driver (OK, that you have a basic ability to operate a vehicle).

Your driver’s license is the card in your wallet with a bad picture of you on it, but that card represents the permission you have been given to drive. But it most commonly refers to official permission, especially from a government. In a general sense, license refers to permission. It comes from the Latin word licentia, which means “authorization” or “freedom” and is based on the Latin verb licēre, meaning “to be allowed.” The first records of license in English come from the 1300s.