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Licenses

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Comparison of Licenses

License Intended scope Copyleft Practical modifiability Attribution Related rights Access control prohibition Worldwide applicability
Against DRM Works of art Normal No Copyright notice Granted Yes Exact translations
Creative Commons Attribution Generic No No Copyright notice No Yes National adaptations
Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike Generic Normal No Copyright notice No Yes National adaptations
Design Science License Generic, optimally science data Normal Yes Copyright notice No No Same license (English version)
Free Art License Works of art Normal No Yes No No Exact translations (French law)
FreeBSD Documentation License Documentation No No Copyright notice No No Same license (English version)
GNU Free Documentation License Documentation Normal Yes Yes No Yes Same license (English version)
GNU Lesser General Public License Generic, optimally Software Weak Yes Copyright notice No No Same license (English version)
GNU General Public License Generic, optimally Software Strong Yes Copyright notice No Version 3 prohibits "Tivoisation" in certain cases Same license (English version)
Lizenz für Freie Inhalte Generic Normal No Yes No No Unknown (license text is German)
MIT License Software No No Copyright notice No No Same license (English version)


List of licenses

Against DRM

BSD-like non-copyleft licenses

In parallel with the set of GNU licenses (including the GNU GPL), the free software world evolved a number of very simple non-copyleft licenses. These licenses are so simple that no dedicated text is needed to expose the terms of the license. To reuse such a license, you must take its text and replace the copyright notice with your own. Since these licenses are non-copyleft, changing the license text in such a way does not prevent reuse between works from happening.

Regardless of their wording, these licenses always grant the user very broad rights, including the right to modify and distribute without supplying any source code. Also, their concise wording makes them simple to understand and unambiguous as to their effects.

These licenses are often called "BSD-like" because the first occurence of such a license has been the license under which the Berkeley Software Distribution (one of the first free versions of Unix) was shipped to users.

One should distinguish the original BSD license with its controversial advertising clause from the revised BSD license that does not have the advertising clause.

Creative Commons Attribution

  • Aliases: CC-BY
  • Current version: 3.0

Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike

  • Aliases: CC-BY-SA
  • Current version: 3.0

Design Science License

  • Not maintained anymoreCite error: Invalid <ref> tag; refs with no name must have content
  • License text (English)


FreeBSD Documentation License

Although especially written for the FreeBSD project, this license shows you how to draft a very simple non-copyleft license for documentation works.

Free Art License

GNU Free Documentation License

Invariant sections

Invariant sections are a special provision of the GFDL which, if used, prevent anyone from modifying the parts of the work which are defined as "invariant". The Free Software Foundation finds it useful to protect some special "non-functional" parts of the work, like a statement of intent (the motivation for invariant sections was, allegedly, to prevent the GNU Manifesto to be removed or modified in GNU documentations).

We believe, however, that freedom should apply to all kind of works, and that what is "functional" in one situation can be "artistic" in another - and vice-versa. Consequently, a work using invariant sections to forbid some kinds of modifications to the work cannot be considered completely free.

Unless additional permissions are granted, all FDL works contain unmodifiable sections which aren't called Invariant Sections, such as a copy of the license embedded in the document itself.

GNU General Public License

The GNU GPL is, according to various statistics, probably the most used free software license. It was also the first license to implement the concept of copyleft, guaranteeing that "GPL'ed" free software cannot become, or take part in, non-free software.

Although the GPL is primarily intended for software programs, it is worded so as to apply to many different kinds of works. The main condition for the GPL to be applicable to a type of work is that it admits the notion of a preferred form of a work for making modifications to it (be it source code in a computer language, music score notation, digital graphics under a format retaining structure, etc.). For example, there are many occurences of text or graphics released under the GPL.

Lizenz für Freie Inhalte

AFAIK only used by the german portal neppstar for free music and video. Anyway, it seems to be a valid free license.

MIT License

This license is arguably the simplest form of the BSD-like licenses for software. All the license, except for the no-warranty statement, is condensed in two short paragraphs.

There are variants, like the current BSD license which has an additional provision forbidding endorsement of derived works using the name of the original authors.

Commentary on non-free licenses

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