Penguin
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Because software is Digital and therefore by nature very cheap to copy, when you purchase software you don't buy it (as in transfer of ownership); you license it, gaining the right to use it under a certain set of restrictions.

Books aren't licensed because when you buy the book, copying the book would cost you more than buying a new book, and up until the invention of the photocopier, bordered on impossible (you would have had to transcribe the book). There really aren't many restrictions on what you can do with a book. The standard "no part of this book may be retransmitted in any medium" is a CopyRight issue.

License is a verb; licence is a noun. However, Americans care not for this kind of distinction, so the text of all the licences you will read use the spelling "license", and as such that's what you'll find on our wiki.

Normal commercial software is licensed under some pretty restrictive terms; terms you wouldn't agree to buying any piece of property under. You used to get your license in the box you buy software in, but more commonly these days it's electronically. This is often in the form of an EndUserLicenseAgreement: the person who "bought" the software might not be the eventual user, and software companies wanted to close that loophole pretty quickly.

The GNU project turned licensing upside down by introducing CopyLeft; a license with different restrictions: the software was still licensed (it wasn't released to the PublicDomain), but with terms saying that if you gave someone the program you also had to give them the SourceCode for the program if they asked for it; and under the same license. That way you cannot take software released under a license like the GPL and take away the freedoms it affords you.

See Category:License for a list of licences.