A contractual agreement between software purchasers and the software publisher that specifies what the purchaser may and may not do with the software. Typically, such licenses include clauses that deny that any sale of goods has taken place; what is being sold is not the software itself, the ownership of which is retained by the software publisher, but rather specific rights to use the software, as detailed in the license; for end-user software sold in the mass market, such rights are typically limited to installing and using the software on one computer only.
Additional license provisions typically absolve the publisher of all liability in case of losses attributable to software flaws and forbid the user to engage in any of the following actions: making additional, unauthorized copies; decompiling or reverse engineering the software; and giving, selling, or renting the software to others.
