69-549: The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility . Unlike copyleft software licenses, the MIT License also permits reuse within proprietary software , provided that all copies of the software or its substantial portions include
138-504: A static web hosting service for blogs , project documentation, and books. All GitHub Pages content is stored in a Git repository as files served to visitors verbatim or in Markdown format. GitHub is integrated with Jekyll static website and blog generator and GitHub continuous integration pipelines. Each time the content source is updated, Jekyll regenerates the website and automatically serves it via GitHub Pages infrastructure. Like
207-512: A BSD conference in 1999. It is a word play on copyright , copyleft and copy center . We call them “pushover licenses” because they can't say “no” when one user tries to deny freedom to others.." In the Free Software Foundation 's guide to license compatibility and relicensing, Richard Stallman defines permissive licenses as "pushover licenses", comparing them to those people who "can't say no", because they are seen as granting
276-409: A Campus Expert, applicants must complete an online training course with multiple modules to develop community leadership skills. GitHub also provides some software as a service (SaaS) integrations for adding extra features to projects. Those services include: GitHub Sponsors allows users to make monthly money donations to projects hosted on GitHub. The public beta was announced on May 23, 2019, and
345-450: A License" service, do not differentiate between MIT/Expat license variants. The text of the Expat variant is presented as simply the "MIT License" (represented by the metadata tag mit ). The original BSD license also includes a clause requiring all advertising of the software to display a notice crediting its authors. This "advertising clause" (since disavowed by UC Berkeley) is present in
414-406: A cloud provider and has been available as of November 2011 . In November 2020, source code for GitHub Enterprise Server was leaked online in an apparent protest against DMCA takedown of youtube-dl . According to GitHub, the source code came from GitHub accidentally sharing the code with Enterprise customers themselves, not from an attack on GitHub servers. In 2008, GitHub introduced GitHub Pages,
483-559: A community, platform and business. Under Microsoft, the service was led by Xamarin 's Nat Friedman , reporting to Scott Guthrie , executive vice president of Microsoft Cloud and AI. Nat Friedman resigned November 3, 2021; he was replaced by Thomas Dohmke. There have been concerns from developers Kyle Simpson, JavaScript trainer and author, and Rafael Laguna, CEO at Open-Xchange over Microsoft's purchase, citing uneasiness over Microsoft's handling of previous acquisitions, such as Nokia's mobile business and Skype . This acquisition
552-477: A copy of the terms of the MIT License and also a copyright notice. In 2015, the MIT License was the most popular software license on GitHub . Notable projects that use the MIT License include the X Window System , Ruby on Rails , Node.js , Lua , jQuery , .NET , Angular , and React . The MIT License has the identifier MIT in the SPDX License List. It is also known as the " Expat License ". It has
621-545: A later time. In addition, GitHub supports the following formats and features: GitHub's Terms of Service do not require public software projects hosted on GitHub to meet the Open Source Definition . The terms of service state, "By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories." GitHub Enterprise is a self-managed version of GitHub with similar functionality. It can be run on an organization's hardware or
690-572: A registered user account, users can have discussions, manage repositories, submit contributions to others' repositories, and review changes to code . GitHub began offering limited private repositories at no cost in January 2019 (limited to three contributors per project). Previously, only public repositories were free. On April 14, 2020, GitHub made "all of the core GitHub features" free for everyone, including "private repositories with unlimited collaborators." The fundamental software that underpins GitHub
759-515: A restriction that says a redistributor cannot add more restrictions. Examples include the CDDL and MsPL . However such restrictions also make the license incompatible with permissive free-software licenses. While they have been in use since the mid-1980s, several authors noted an increase in the popularity of permissive licenses during the 2010s. As of 2015, the MIT License , a permissive license,
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#1733086315521828-755: A right to "deny freedom to others." The Foundation recommends pushover licenses only for small programs, below 300 lines of code, where "the benefits provided by copyleft are usually too small to justify the inconvenience of making sure a copy of the license always accompanies the software". GitHub GitHub ( / ˈ ɡ ɪ t h ʌ b / ) is a developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage and share their code. It uses Git software, which provides distributed version control of access control , bug tracking , software feature requests, task management , continuous integration , and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California , it has been
897-416: A search engine are available for issue tracking. For version control, Git (and, by extension, GitHub) allows pull requests to propose changes to the source code. Users who can review the proposed changes can see a diff between the requested changes and approve them. In Git terminology, this action is called "committing" and one instance of it is a "commit." A history of all commits is kept and can be viewed at
966-510: A significant user of GitHub, using it to host open-source projects and development tools such as .NET Core , Chakra Core , MSBuild , PowerShell , PowerToys , Visual Studio Code , Windows Calculator , Windows Terminal and the bulk of its product documentation (now to be found on Microsoft Docs ). On June 4, 2018, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire GitHub for US$ 7.5 billion (~$ 8.96 billion in 2023). The deal closed on October 26, 2018. GitHub continued to operate independently as
1035-401: A statement denying Horvath's allegations. However, following an internal investigation, GitHub confirmed the claims. GitHub's CEO Chris Wanstrath wrote on the company blog, "The investigation found Tom Preston-Werner in his capacity as GitHub's CEO acted inappropriately, including confrontational conduct, disregard of workplace complaints, insensitivity to the impact of his spouse's presence in
1104-496: A subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018. It is commonly used to host open source software development projects. As of January 2023 , GitHub reported having over 100 million developers and more than 420 million repositories , including at least 28 million public repositories. It is the world's largest source code host as of June 2023 . Over five billion developer contributions were made to more than 500 million open source projects in 2024. The development of
1173-403: A total of 135,000 repositories. In 2010, GitHub was hosting 1 million repositories. A year later, this number doubled. ReadWriteWeb reported that GitHub had surpassed SourceForge and Google Code in total number of commits for the period of January to May 2011. On January 16, 2013, GitHub passed the 3 million users mark and was then hosting more than 5 million repositories. By the end of
1242-505: A variation of the MIT License, has the identifier MIT-0 in the SPDX License List. A request for legacy approval to the Open Source Initiative was filed on May 15, 2020, which led to a formal approval on August 5, 2020. By doing so, it forms a public-domain-equivalent license , the same way as BSD Zero Clause . It has the following terms: The SPDX License List contains extra MIT license variations. Examples include: There
1311-491: A website that enables designers to market royalty-free digital images . The illustration GitHub chose was a character that Oxley had named Octopuss. Since GitHub wanted Octopuss for their logo (a use that the iStock license disallows), they negotiated with Oxley to buy exclusive rights to the image. GitHub renamed Octopuss to Octocat, and trademarked the character along with the new name. Later, GitHub hired illustrator Cameron McEfee to adapt Octocat for different purposes on
1380-465: Is Git itself, written by Linus Torvalds , creator of Linux. The additional software that provides the GitHub user interface was written using Ruby on Rails and Erlang by GitHub, Inc. developers Wanstrath, Hyett, and Preston-Werner. The primary purpose of GitHub is to facilitate the version control and issue tracking aspects of software development. Labels, milestones, responsibility assignment, and
1449-583: Is also the Anti-Capitalist Software License (ACSL), built off of the MIT license. It is not Open Source, since it limits the permissions granted to individuals and organizations that do not operate under capitalist structures, like non-profits and cooperatives. The name "MIT License" is potentially ambiguous. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has used many licenses for software since its creation; for example, MIT offers four licensing options for
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#17330863155211518-519: Is explicit about the patent rights an owner grants when the code or derivative work is distributed, the MIT license does not discuss patents. Moreover, the GPL license impacts derivative works, but the MIT license does not. Like the BSD license, the MIT license does not include an express patent license although some commentators state that the grant of rights covers all potential restrictions including patents. Both
1587-498: Is indicated on the gist page. GitHub launched a new program called the GitHub Student Developer Pack to give students free access to more than a dozen popular development tools and services. GitHub partnered with Bitnami , Crowdflower , DigitalOcean , DNSimple, HackHands , Namecheap , Orchestrate, Screenhero, SendGrid , Stripe , Travis CI , and Unreal Engine to launch the program. In 2016, GitHub announced
1656-424: Is required by law. This includes keeping public repositories services, including those for open source projects, available and accessible to support personal communications involving developers in sanctioned regions. Developers who feel that they should not have restrictions can appeal for the removal of said restrictions, including those who only travel to, and do not reside in, those countries. GitHub has forbidden
1725-471: Is the X.Org Server , which is licensed under what is effectively the common MIT license, according to the X.org licensing page: The X.Org Foundation has chosen the following format of the MIT License as the preferred format for code included in the X Window System distribution. This is a slight variant of the common MIT license form published by the Open Source Initiative The "slight variant"
1794-554: Is the addition of the phrase "(including the next paragraph)" to the second paragraph of the license text, resulting in: "The above copyright notice and this permission notice (including the next paragraph) shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." This inclusion clarifies that the liability paragraph must also be included for the conditions of the license to be met. The license-management features at popular source code repository GitHub , as well as its "Choose
1863-448: Is the most popular free software license, followed by GPLv2 . A "permissive" license is simply a non-copyleft open source license. Sometimes the word "permissive" is considered too ambiguous, because all free software licenses are "permissive", in the sense that they all allow to modify and redistribute the source code. In most cases the real opposition is between copyleft licenses and non-copyleft ones, thus some authors prefer to use
1932-505: Is usually used for larger projects. Tom Preston-Werner débuted the feature at a Ruby conference in 2008. Gist builds on the traditional simple concept of a pastebin by adding version control for code snippets, easy forking, and TLS encryption for private pastes. Because each "gist" is its own Git repository, multiple code snippets can be contained in a single page, and they can be pushed and pulled using Git. Unregistered users could upload Gists until March 19, 2018, when uploading Gists
2001-573: The 4-clause BSD license , the PHP License , and the OpenSSL License , have clauses requiring advertising materials to credit the copyright holder, which made them incompatible with copyleft licenses. Popular modern permissive licenses, however, such as the MIT License , the 3-clause BSD license and the zlib license , don't include advertising clauses and are generally compatible with copyleft licenses. Some licenses do not allow derived works to add
2070-693: The FFTW C source code library, one of which is the GPL v2.0 and the other three of which are not open-source . The term "MIT License" has also been used to refer to the Expat License (used for the XML parsing library Expat ) and to the X11 License (also called " MIT/X Consortium License "; used for X Window System by the MIT X Consortium ). Furthermore, the "MIT License" as published by
2139-482: The Open Source Initiative is the same as the Expat License. Due to this differing use of terms, some prefer to avoid the name "MIT License". The Free Software Foundation argues that the term is misleading and ambiguous, and recommends against its use. The X Consortium was dissolved late in 1996, and its assets transferred to The Open Group , which released X11R6 initially under the same license. The X11 License and
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2208-559: The Svalbard Global Seed Vault . The archive contained the code of all active public repositories, as well as that of dormant but significant public repositories. The 21 TB of data was stored on piqlFilm archival film reels as matrix (2D) barcode ( Boxing barcode ), and is expected to last 500–1,000 years. The GitHub Archive Program is also working with partners on Project Silica, in an attempt to store all public repositories for 10,000 years. It aims to write archives into
2277-455: The BSD and the MIT licenses were drafted before the patentability of software was generally recognized under US law. The Apache License version 2.0 is a similarly permissive license that includes an explicit contributor's patent license. Of specific relevance to US jurisdictions, the MIT license uses the terms "sell" and "use" that are also used in defining the rights of a patent holder in Title 35 of
2346-449: 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
2415-537: The GitHub platform began on October 19, 2007. The site was launched in April 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner , Chris Wanstrath , P. J. Hyett and Scott Chacon after it had been available for a few months as a beta release . Its name was chosen as a compound of Git and hub . GitHub, Inc. was originally a flat organization with no middle managers, instead relying on self-management . Employees could choose to work on projects that interested them ( open allocation ), but
2484-506: The United States Code section 154. This has been construed by some commentators as an unconventional but implicit license in the US to use any underlying patents. One of the originators of the MIT license, computer scientist Jerry Saltzer , has published his recollections of its early development, along with documentary evidence. As of 2020, according to WhiteSource Software the MIT license
2553-593: The X11R6 "MIT License" chosen for ncurses by the Free Software Foundation both include the following clause, absent in the Expat License: Except as contained in this notice, the name(s) of the above copyright holders shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization. As of 2020, the successor to the X Window System
2622-463: The chief executive set salaries. In 2014, the company added a layer of middle management in response to serious harassment allegations against its senior leadership. As a result of the scandal, Tom Preston-Werner resigned from his position as CEO. GitHub was a bootstrapped start-up business , which in its first years provided enough revenue to be funded solely by its three founders and start taking on employees. In July 2012, four years after
2691-444: The company was founded, Andreessen Horowitz invested $ 100 million in venture capital with a $ 750 million valuation. In July 2015 GitHub raised another $ 250 million (~$ 314 million in 2023) of venture capital in a series B round . The lead investor was Sequoia Capital , and other investors were Andreessen Horowitz , Thrive Capital , IVP (Institutional Venture Partners) and other venture capital funds. The company
2760-590: 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
2829-415: The final users might not be developers at all, and in this case copyleft licenses offer them the everlasting right to access a software as free software, ensuring that it will never become closed source – while permissive licenses offer no rights at all to non-developer final users, and software released with a permissive license could theoretically become from one day to another a closed source malware without
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2898-420: The first year of being online, GitHub had accumulated over 46,000 public repositories, 17,000 of which were formed in the previous month. At that time, about 6,200 repositories had been forked at least once, and 4,600 had been merged. That same year, the site was used by over 100,000 users, according to GitHub, and had grown to host 90,000 unique public repositories, 12,000 having been forked at least once, for
2967-511: The first year: it pledges to cover payment processing costs and match sponsorship payments up to $ 5,000 per developer. Furthermore, users can still use similar services like Patreon and Open Collective and link to their websites. In July 2020, GitHub stored a February archive of the site in an abandoned mountain mine in Svalbard , Norway, part of the Arctic World Archive and not far from
3036-489: The following terms: The X11 License , also known as the MIT/X Consortium License , is a variation on the MIT license, most known for its usage by the X Consortium . It has the identifier X11 in the SPDX License List. It differs from the MIT License mainly by an additional clause restricting use of the copyright holders' name for advertisement. It has the following terms: The MIT No Attribution License,
3105-527: The launch of the GitHub Campus Experts program to train and encourage students to grow technology communities at their universities. The Campus Experts program is open to university students 18 years and older worldwide. GitHub Campus Experts are one of the primary ways that GitHub funds student-oriented events and communities, Campus Experts are given access to training, funding, and additional resources to run events and grow their communities. To become
3174-433: The media through a spokesperson, saying: GitHub is subject to US trade control laws, and is committed to full compliance with applicable law. At the same time, GitHub's vision is to be the global platform for developer collaboration, no matter where developers reside. As a result, we take seriously our responsibility to examine government mandates thoroughly to be certain that users and customers are not impacted beyond what
3243-469: The modified MIT License used by XFree86 . The University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License combines text from both the MIT and BSD licenses; the license grant and disclaimer are taken from the MIT License. The ISC license contains similarities to both the MIT and simplified BSD licenses, the biggest difference being that language deemed unnecessary by the Berne Convention is omitted. The GPL
3312-421: The molecular structure of quartz glass platters, using a high-precision petahertz pulse laser, i.e. one that pulses a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) times per second. In March 2014, GitHub programmer Julie Ann Horvath alleged that founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner and his wife, Theresa, engaged in a pattern of harassment against her that led to her leaving the company. In April 2014, GitHub released
3381-409: The project accepts waitlist registrations. The Verge said that GitHub Sponsors "works exactly like Patreon " because "developers can offer various funding tiers that come with different perks, and they'll receive recurring payments from supporters who want to access them and encourage their work" except with "zero fees to use the program." Furthermore, GitHub offers incentives for early adopters during
3450-695: The public domain, on the grounds that this can be legally problematic in some jurisdictions. Public-domain-equivalent licenses are an attempt to solve this problem, providing a fallback permissive license for cases where renunciation of copyright is not legally possible, and sometimes also including a disclaimer of warranties similar to most permissive licenses. In general permissive licenses have good license compatibility with most other software licenses in most situations. Due to their non-restrictiveness, most permissive software licenses are even compatible with copyleft licenses, which are incompatible with most other licenses. Some older permissive licenses, such as
3519-422: The rest of GitHub, it includes free and paid service tiers. Websites generated through this service are hosted either as subdomains of the github.io domain or can be connected to custom domains bought through a third-party domain name registrar . GitHub Pages supports HTTPS encryption. GitHub also operates a pastebin -style site called Gist , which is for code snippets , as opposed to GitHub proper, which
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#17330863155213588-420: The right to modify and exploit source code written by others and possibly incorporate it into proprietary code and make money with it (and therefore these see permissive licenses as offering them a "right"), while for other developers it might be more valuable to know that nobody will ever capitalize what has mostly been their work (and therefore these see copyleft licenses as offering them a "right"). Furthermore,
3657-499: The sale bolstered interest in competitors: Bitbucket (owned by Atlassian ), GitLab and SourceForge (owned by BIZX, LLC) reported that they had seen spikes in new users intending to migrate projects from GitHub to their respective services. In September 2019, GitHub acquired Semmle , a code analysis tool. In February 2020, GitHub launched in India under the name GitHub India Private Limited. In March 2020, GitHub announced that it
3726-411: The site provides social networking -like functions such as feeds, followers, wikis (using wiki software called Gollum ), and a social network graph to display how developers work on their versions (" forks ") of a repository and what fork (and branch within that fork) is newest. Anyone can browse and download public repositories, but only registered users can contribute content to repositories. With
3795-632: 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 . As of 2016, 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 <YEAR>, <AUTHORS> Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty, provided
3864-457: 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. If the latter are developers, for some it might be valuable to have
3933-420: The term "non-copyleft" instead of "permissive". Berkeley had what we called "copycenter," which is "take it down to the copy center and make as many copies as you want." Copycenter is a term originally used to explain the modified BSD license , a permissive free-software license. The term was presented by computer scientist and Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) contributor Marshall Kirk McKusick at
4002-565: The use of VPNs and IP proxies to access the site from sanctioned countries, as purchase history and IP addresses are how they flag users, among other sources. On December 4, 2014, Russia blacklisted GitHub.com because GitHub initially refused to take down user-posted suicide manuals. After a day, Russia withdrew its block, and GitHub began blocking specific content and pages in Russia. On December 31, 2014, India blocked GitHub.com along with 31 other websites over pro- ISIS content posted by users;
4071-413: The user even knowing it. Permissive licenses offer more extensive license compatibility than copyleft licenses, which cannot generally be freely combined and mixed, because their reciprocity requirements conflict with each other. Computer Associates Int'l v. Altai used the term "public domain" to refer to works that have become widely shared and distributed under permission, rather than work that
4140-454: The website and promotional materials; McEfee and various GitHub users have since created hundreds of variations of the character, which are available on The Octodex . Projects on GitHub can be accessed and managed using the standard Git command-line interface; all standard Git commands work with it. GitHub also allows users to browse public repositories on the site. Multiple desktop clients and Git plugins are also available. In addition,
4209-563: The workplace, and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office." Preston-Werner subsequently resigned from the company. The firm then announced it would implement new initiatives and trainings "to make sure employee concerns and conflicts are taken seriously and dealt with appropriately." On July 25, 2019, a developer based in Iran wrote on Medium that GitHub had blocked his private repositories and prohibited access to GitHub pages. Soon after, GitHub confirmed that it
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#17330863155214278-553: The year, the number of repositories was twice as great, reaching 10 million repositories. In 2015, GitHub opened an office in Japan, its first outside of the U.S. On February 28, 2018, GitHub fell victim to the third-largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in history, with incoming traffic reaching a peak of about 1.35 terabits per second. On June 19, 2018, GitHub expanded its GitHub Education by offering free education bundles to all schools. From 2012, Microsoft became
4347-487: Was acquiring npm , a JavaScript packaging vendor, for an undisclosed sum of money. The deal was closed on April 15, 2020. In early July 2020, the GitHub Archive Program was established to archive its open-source code in perpetuity. GitHub's mascot is an anthropomorphized "octocat" with five octopus-like arms . The character was created by graphic designer Simon Oxley as clip art to sell on iStock ,
4416-646: Was deliberately put into the public domain. However, permissive licenses are not actually equivalent to releasing a work into the public domain . Permissive licenses often do stipulate some limited requirements, such as that the original authors must be credited ( attribution ). If a work is truly in the public domain, this is usually not legally required, but a United States copyright registration requires disclosing material that has been previously published, and attribution may still be considered an ethical requirement in academia . Advocates of permissive licenses often recommend against attempting to release software to
4485-446: Was in line with Microsoft's business strategy under CEO Satya Nadella , which has seen a larger focus on cloud computing services, alongside the development of and contributions to open-source software. Harvard Business Review argued that Microsoft was intending to acquire GitHub to get access to its user base, so it can be used as a loss leader to encourage the use of its other development products and services. Concerns over
4554-448: Was now blocking developers in Iran , Crimea , Cuba , North Korea , and Syria from accessing private repositories. However, GitHub reopened access to GitHub Pages days later, for public repositories regardless of location. It was also revealed that using GitHub while visiting sanctioned countries could result in similar actions occurring on a user's account. GitHub responded to complaints and
4623-446: Was restricted to logged-in users, reportedly to mitigate spamming on the page of recent Gists. Gists' URLs use hexadecimal IDs, and edits to Gists are recorded in a revision history , which can show the text difference of thirty revisions per page with an option between a "split" and "unified" view. Like repositories, Gists can be forked, "starred", i.e., publicly bookmarked, and commented on. The count of revisions, stars, and forks
4692-521: Was then valued at approximately $ 2 billion. As of 2023, GitHub was estimated to generate $ 1 billion in revenue. The GitHub service was developed by Chris Wanstrath , P. J. Hyett , Tom Preston-Werner , and Scott Chacon using Ruby on Rails , and started in February 2008. The company, GitHub, Inc., was formed in 2007 and is located in San Francisco. On February 24, 2009, GitHub announced that within
4761-552: Was used in 27% of four million open source packages. As of 2015, according to Black Duck Software and a 2015 blog from GitHub , the MIT license was the most popular open-source license , with the GNU GPLv2 coming second in their sample of repositories. Permissive software license 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
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