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Licenses
Comparison of Licenses
LicenseLicensesFAQLogosContact
Against DRM 2.0
1. Definitions
Access control mechanism: a technological measure which, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner or related rights owner, to gain access to the work.
Acts authorised by licensor: acts concerning granted rights (in particular, act of access, act of copy, act of modification, act of sharing).
Acts not authorised by licensor: acts concerning copyright or possible moral rights.
Author/s: the creator/s of an original work or the creator/s of a derivative work.
Broadcasting: the use of any means of distribution over a distance, such as telegraph, telephone, radio, television and other comparable media, including communication to the public by satellite and cable retransmission.
Copy control mechanism: a technological measure which, in the ordinary course of its operation, prevents, restricts, or otherwise limits the exercise of a right of the copyright owner or related rights owner.
Derivative work: a work based upon the copyrightable work released under the terms and the conditions of this license.
Distribution: the marketing, the placing in circulation or the making available to the public, by whatever means and for whatever purpose, of a work or of copies thereof.
Elaboration: all forms of modification, adaptation and transformation of a work.
Lending: the making available for use of originals, of copies or of carriers of copyright works, for a limited period of time and for purposes other than those referred to in the paragraph 16.
Licensee: the person acquiring rights under the terms and the conditions of this license.
Licensor: the person offering the work under the terms and the conditions of this license.
Moral rights: the author's right, recognized in some countries, to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to, the said work, which would be prejudicial to his honor or reputation; other author's rights recognized as moral rights in some countries.
Original work: a work not based upon another work.
Related rights: the rights that belong to the performers, the producers of phonograms and broadcasting organizations in relation to their performances, phonograms and broadcasts respectively.
Rental: the making available for use of originals, of copies or of carriers of copyright works, for a limited period of time and for direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage.
Reproduction: the multiplication of copies of a work by any means, such as copying by hand, printing, lithography, engraving, photography, phonography, cinematography and any other process of reproduction.
Transcription: the use of means suitable for transforming an oral work into a written work or into a work reproduced by one of the methods referred to in the preceding paragraph.
Translation: the translation of the work into another language or dialect.
Work: the copyrightable work released under the terms and the conditions of this license.
2. License's area of applicability
This license concerns copyright and related rights: this license does not treat any other right.
Nothing in this license is intended to prevent or restrict the exercise of rights not treated in this license, such as rights concerning privacy, private property, sale and other personal or private rights.
Nothing in this license is intended to prevent or restrict the private use of any lawful technological measure.
Nothing in this license is intended to prevent or restrict any limitation on the exclusive rights of the copyright owner or related rights owner under copyright law or other applicable law.
This license is applicable to the works of the mind having a creative character and belonging to literature, music, figurative arts, architecture, theater or cinematography, whatever their mode or form of expression.
3. Object
In particular, this license is applicable to:
a. literary, dramatic, scientific, didactic and religious works, whether in written or oral form;
b. musical works and compositions, with or without words, dramatico-musical works and musical variations that themselves constitute original works;
c. choreographic works and works of dumb show, the form of which is fixed in writing or otherwise;
d. works of sculpture, painting, drawing, engraving and similar figurative arts, including scenic art;
e. architectural plans and works;
f. works of cinematographic art, whether silent or with sound;
g. works of photographic art and works expressed with processes analogous to photography;
h. industrial design works that have creative character or inherent artistic character;
i. collective works formed by the assembling of works, or parts of works, and possessing the character of a self-contained creation resulting from selection and coordination with a specific literary, scientific, didactic, religious, political or artistic aim, such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, anthologies, magazines and newspapers;
j. works of a creative character derived from any such work, such as translations into another language, transformations into any other literary or artistic form, modifications and additions constituting a substantial remodeling of the original work, adaptations, arrangements, abridgments and variations which do not constitute an original work.
4. Grant of rights
Licensor authorizes licensee to exercise the following rights: a. right of reproduction; b. right of distribution; c. right of publishing (also in a collection); d. right of public performance or recitation; e. right of broadcasting; f. right of modification; g. right of elaboration; h. right of transcription; i. right of translation; j. right of lending; k. right of rental; l. right of commercial use.
5. Related rights and sublicensing
Licensor declares to be related rights owner and he authorizes licensee to exercise them.
If the work is not object of related rights, preceding paragraph must be considered as void and having no legal effect.
Licensee may not sublicense the work.
6. No DRM
This license is incompatible with any technology, device or component that, in the normal course of its operation, is designed to prevent or restrict acts which are authorised or not authorised by licensor: this incompatibility causes the inapplicability of the license to the work.
In particular: a. it is not possible to release validly under this license works or derivative works whose access control mechanism and/or copy control mechanism prevents or restricts quantitatively and/or qualitatively access to, fruition, copy, modification and/or sharing of them; b. in conformity with this license, it is not allowed to prevent or restrict quantitatively and/or qualitatively access to, fruition, copy, modification, and/or sharing of works or derivative works through an access control mechanism and/or a copy control mechanism; c. in conformity with this license, it is not allowed to prevent or restrict the exercise of a granted right through any digital, analog or physical method.
7. Copyleft clause
Derivative works, performances of the work, phonograms in which the work is fixed, broadcastings of the work must be released with a license that provides: a. the renunciation to exclusive exercise of rights referred to in the articles 4 and 5; b. the same type of clause described in article 6; c. the same type of clause described in this article.
8. Resolutory clause
Any breach of this license (in particular, the breach of the articles 6 and 7) will automatically void this license, without the necessity of any communication from licensor.
9. DISCLAIMER
TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, LICENSOR OFFERS THE WORK "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES ARE DISCLAIMED. TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL LICENSOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES HOWEVER CAUSED.
10. Copyright notice
[Original work] Copyright (C) [year/s] [name/s of author/s] [Work] Copyright (C) [year/s] [name/s of author/s] [Derivative work] Copyright (C) [year/s] [name/s of author/s]
Licensee must keep intact copyright notice and all notices that refer to this license.
Licensee must include a copy of this license with every copy of the work the licensee distributes, publicly demonstrates or publicly performs.
Definition of Free Cultural Works
Comparison of Licenses[eital]
Criteria for choosing a license[eital]
We explain hereafter some of the criteria which may influence your choice of a free content license. Those criteria are not inherently good or bad. The importance of each criteria depends on the context (for example the kind of work, or the kind of collaborative process you want to encourage), and on personal preferences.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive. Other aspects may be important, like the clarity of the wording of a license, or the philosophy which is defended by its authors, or whether the license is surrounded by an active community of authors.
Endly, we want to stress that, before choosing a license, you must read the license text carefully. No summary, no matter how attractive or reassuring, can replace detailed understanding of the license itself.
Intended scope[eital]
Some licenses strive to be as generic as is humanly (or rather, legally) possible. Others deliberately focus on a specific domain of creation, like software, or documentation. When a license has such a focus, it doesn't mean that it cannot be used for other kinds of works, but that its main area of use (and thus its social recognition as a trustable license) is clearly bounded.
For example, the GNU GPL can be used for many kinds of works, but its main area of recognition is software.
Copyleft[eital]
Fd sq icon sa.svg
When a work is "copylefted", it means all derived works (even if they mix in other works as well) must be distributed under the same terms (usually the same exact license) as the original work.
Therefore, using a copyleft license pretty much guarantees that users of subsequent works (for example modified copies) will be granted the same essential freedoms. Conversely, a derivative of a non-copylefted work can be distributed under different terms, and even be rendered non-free. On the other hand, a copyleft license can also limit opportunities for re-use, because most copyleft licenses are not compatible between each other. This is why people sometimes prefer non-copyleft license, depending on the work and the kind of practices they want to encourage. Copyleft licenses are sometimes even considered to be non-free because of the restrictions for redistribution of the works.
ShareAlike is a synonym of copyleft in the Creative Commons vocabulary.
Strong copyleft also forbids linking or integration the subject work into larger works/projects that are not also licensed with a license with compatible copyleft terms. Weak copyleft lacks such a 'viral copyleft' requirement.
Practical modifiability[eital]
Fd sq icon sc.svg
Although all free licenses give you the legal right to modify, not all of them try to specify how modifiability of the work is practically enforced. Requiring modifiability is important, especially for works which can be distributed under a completely opaque format such as software binary code ("object code").
The licenses which require practical modifiability usually define a notion of source code, source data or similar. The GNU FDL defines transparent copies and disallows use of technological protection measures (TPM). The Creative Commons licenses disallow use of TPMs.
Attribution[eital]
Fd sq icon by.svg
Requiring attribution means that authorship for the work must be recognized in any circumstances. In the context of derived works (modified copies), this includes the initial as well as subsequent authors and contributors. Some licenses will mandate how an author is to be credited: for instance, only the person's name, a name alongside contact information or a link to the person's homepage, or possibly under a pseudonym.
It is often stated that all licenses can implicitly require attribution, as they mandate that the copyright notice must be kept intact when distributing copies. By including up-to-date authorship information in the copyright notice, one can indeed forbid subsequent works to erase that information. However, future contributions to the work are not guaranteed to be also credited using such a mechanism; indeed, it is based on the good will of authors (or maintainers) of subsequent works. Having an Attribution requirement prevents this from happening and mandates that all subsequent works have the same policy in mentioning authorship.
Attribution is a double-edged sword, as it may become a heavy burden to list all contributors for projects which imply seamless and massive collaboration (like Wikipedia). For many works it is, however, a reasonable requirement.
[eital]
Fd sq icon rr.svg
Related rights concern not the mere copying and modification of the work, but its use in a derived manner: for example, performing the work, displaying it in public or private, broadcasting, webcasting, etc. Related rights exist for various areas of creation (songs, theater...); they often belong to people other than the authors of the work, such as performers, producers of phonograms, etc.
Some free content licenses take care to also grant related rights to the recipient of the work. There may even be a copyleft provision which states that related works (interpretations, performances, recordings) must be released under the same license as the work.
Access control prohibition[eital]
Fd sq icon drm.svg
Some licenses contain a clause, which forbids to control access to the licensed content. In some licenses this clause concerns only the licensee (licensor can use access control systems to forbid not granted rights).
→ DRM
Worldwide applicability[eital]
When distributing a free work over the world, it is important to understand how people from other countries will be able to reuse this work.
License writers have adopted three different strategies regarding the internationalization of their licenses:
same license for everyone: only the original license text (often in English) is given legal value, and translations may be provided purely for information purposes; exact translations: translations of the original license text are provided, which all have legal value; those translations have exactly the same clauses and wording as the original text; local adaptations: the license is rewritten according to each national legal system. Attention: some licenses use a specific national law: so you cannot interpret the license through your national law, but through the law specified in the license. For example, Free Art License uses French law (you must pay attention to French law also if the license is written in English, German or other languages).
The two first schemes ensure that everyone is given the same rights. In the third scheme (local adaptations), similarity and equivalence of the different versions should be carefully examined.
According to advocates of the adaptation scheme, licenses must be rewritten in order to cope with the peculiarities of the various legal systems. This position is held by the Creative Commons organization.
According to opponents of the adaptation scheme, having different national versions of a license presents the risk to break trust and interoperability. Also, they stress that the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works provides a framework which, with careful drafting, allows to write internationally applicable license texts. This position is held by the Free Software Foundation and by the Free Art License authors.
List of licenses[eital]
Against DRM[eital]
current version: 2.0 author: Free Creations reference URL (English): https://web.archive.org/web/20170327160245/http://www.freecreations.org:80/Against_DRM2.html reference URL (Spanish): https://web.archive.org/web/20160702030610/http://www.freecreations.org/Against_DRM2_es1.html BSD-like non-copyleft licenses[eital]
In parallel with the set of GNU licenses (including the GNU GPL), the free software world evolved a number of very simple permissive (copyfree) 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 occurrence 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.
CC0 Public Domain Dedication[eital]
Aliases: CC-0, Creative Commons Zero Current version: 1.0 CERN OHL[eital]
The CERN Open Hardware License (CERN OHL) is a license used in open-source hardware projects (OSHW).
Wikipedia: CERN Open Hardware License http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cernohl/wiki Creative Commons Attribution[eital]
Aliases: CC-BY Current version: 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike[eital]
Aliases: CC-BY-SA Current version: 4.0 Design Science License[eital]
Not maintained anymore License text (English) FreeBSD Documentation License[eital]
author: FreeBSD Project reference URL: http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-doc-license.html 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[eital]
Aliases: License Arte Libre, FAL, LAL Current version: 1.3 author: Copyleft Attitude License text (English, version 1.3) License text (French) GNU Free Documentation License[eital]
Aliases: GNU FDL, GFDL, FDL Current version: 1.3 License text (English) Invariant sections[eital]
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[eital]
Aliases: GNU GPL, GPL Current version: 3.0 Author: Free Software Foundation License text (English) 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 occurrences of text or graphics released under the GPL.
Lizenz für Freie Inhalte[eital]
Aliases: LFFI License Text (German) AFAIK only used by the german portal neppstar for free music and video. Anyway, it seems to be a valid free license.
MirOS Licence[eital]
Aliases: MirBSD, MirOS reference URL: http://mirbsd.de/MirOS-Licence other conformance: DFSG, OSD (OSI approved), OKD (OKFN approved) This licence is intended as the European variant of the BSD/MIT licences, but applicable as widely as possible. It shifts focus away from code/software by using the generic term “work” (of authorship), and as such can be used for mostly everything (code, documentation, audiovisual content, possibly others; for example fonts in jurisdictions where they are protected by copyright law). It’s intended as a permissive or "Copycenter" licence (so no copyleft, as that would be a restriction; basically “do what you want, leave me alone, but give due credits”) with as few strings as possible attached (so no “forced freedom” anti-DRM clauses, etc.) and weighs in less than one Kibibyte. Most permissions are enumerated, but the grant is not limited to them. Attribution is required by retaining the copyright notices, licence and disclaimer (this is not a copyleft though) or reproducing it in the accompanying documents (the BSD world is all about credits being given but freedom being unrestricted and not enforced). The disclaimer’s wording has been modified to meet certain European law requirements.
MIT License[eital]
author: MIT reference URL: http://www.opensource.org/osi3.0/licenses/mit-license.php 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.
Open Publication License[eital]
The Open Publication License (OPL) was among the earliest open-content licenses -- it predates the 2002 GFDL by over 3 years.
The Fedora project selected the OPL for their documentation. (At various times, the Fedora project released their documentation under the GNU FDL, the OPL, and CC-by-SA. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Archive:Relicensing_OPL_to_CC_BY_SA?rd=Relicensing_OPL_to_CC_BY_SA http://iquaid.org/2009/07/06/why-relicense-fedora-documentation-and-wiki-content/ for details).
http://opencontent.org/openpub/ David Wiley. "About the Open Publication License". Open Source Hardware[eital]
Open Source Hardware OSHW is apparently "a standard by which to evaluate licenses for hardware designs".
http://clothbot.com/wiki/Open_Source_Hardware [eital]
Essay about the Creative Commons non-commercial restriction Editorial on the Creative Commons no-derivatives restriction Article on Redis non-free custom license
| License | Intended scope | Copyleft | Practical modifiability | Attribution | Related rights | Access control prohibition | Worldwide applicability |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Against DRM | Works of art | Normal | No | Copyright notice | Granted | Licensor & Licensee | Exact translations |
| CC0 Public Domain Dedication | Generic | No | No | No | No | No | Same license (English version) |
| Creative Commons Attribution | Generic | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | National adaptations |
| Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike | Generic | Normal | No | Yes | 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 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Exact translations (French law) |
| FreeBSD Documentation License | Documentation | No | Yes | Copyright notice | Yes | Yes | Same license (English version) |
| GNU Free Documentation License | Documentation | Normal | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Same license (English version) |
| GNU Lesser General Public License | Generic, optimally Software | Weak | Yes | Copyright notice | Yes | Yes | Same license (English version) |
| GNU General Public License | Generic, optimally Software | Strong | Yes | Copyright notice | Yes | Version 3 prohibits "Tivoisation" in certain cases | Same license (English version) |
| Lizenz für Freie Inhalte | Generic | Normal | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Unknown (license text is German) |
| MirOS Licence | Generic (software, content, …) | No | Yes | Copyright notice | Yes | No | Same licence (English version) |
| MIT License | Software | No | Yes | Copyright notice | Yes | Yes | Same license (English version) |
Criteria for choosing a license
We explain hereafter some of the criteria which may influence your choice of a free content license. Those criteria are not inherently good or bad. The importance of each criteria depends on the context (for example the kind of work, or the kind of collaborative process you want to encourage), and on personal preferences.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive. Other aspects may be important, like the clarity of the wording of a license, or the philosophy which is defended by its authors, or whether the license is surrounded by an active community of authors.
Endly, we want to stress that, before choosing a license, you must read the license text carefully. No summary, no matter how attractive or reassuring, can replace detailed understanding of the license itself.
Intended scope
Some licenses strive to be as generic as is humanly (or rather, legally) possible. Others deliberately focus on a specific domain of creation, like software, or documentation. When a license has such a focus, it doesn't mean that it cannot be used for other kinds of works, but that its main area of use (and thus its social recognition as a trustable license) is clearly bounded.
For example, the GNU GPL can be used for many kinds of works, but its main area of recognition is software.
Copyleft
When a work is "copylefted", it means all derived works (even if they mix in other works as well) must be distributed under the same terms (usually the same exact license) as the original work.
Therefore, using a copyleft license pretty much guarantees that users of subsequent works (for example modified copies) will be granted the same essential freedoms. Conversely, a derivative of a non-copylefted work can be distributed under different terms, and even be rendered non-free. On the other hand, a copyleft license can also limit opportunities for re-use, because most copyleft licenses are not compatible between each other. This is why people sometimes prefer non-copyleft license, depending on the work and the kind of practices they want to encourage. Copyleft licenses are sometimes even considered to be non-free because of the restrictions for redistribution of the works.
ShareAlike is a synonym of copyleft in the Creative Commons vocabulary.
Strong copyleft also forbids linking or integration the subject work into larger works/projects that are not also licensed with a license with compatible copyleft terms. Weak copyleft lacks such a 'viral copyleft' requirement.
Practical modifiability
Although all free licenses give you the legal right to modify, not all of them try to specify how modifiability of the work is practically enforced. Requiring modifiability is important, especially for works which can be distributed under a completely opaque format such as software binary code ("object code").
The licenses which require practical modifiability usually define a notion of source code, source data or similar. The GNU FDL defines transparent copies and disallows use of technological protection measures (TPM). The Creative Commons licenses disallow use of TPMs.
Attribution
Requiring attribution means that authorship for the work must be recognized in any circumstances. In the context of derived works (modified copies), this includes the initial as well as subsequent authors and contributors. Some licenses will mandate how an author is to be credited: for instance, only the person's name, a name alongside contact information or a link to the person's homepage, or possibly under a pseudonym.
It is often stated that all licenses can implicitly require attribution, as they mandate that the copyright notice must be kept intact when distributing copies. By including up-to-date authorship information in the copyright notice, one can indeed forbid subsequent works to erase that information. However, future contributions to the work are not guaranteed to be also credited using such a mechanism; indeed, it is based on the good will of authors (or maintainers) of subsequent works. Having an Attribution requirement prevents this from happening and mandates that all subsequent works have the same policy in mentioning authorship.
Attribution is a double-edged sword, as it may become a heavy burden to list all contributors for projects which imply seamless and massive collaboration (like Wikipedia). For many works it is, however, a reasonable requirement.
Related rights
Related rights concern not the mere copying and modification of the work, but its use in a derived manner: for example, performing the work, displaying it in public or private, broadcasting, webcasting, etc. Related rights exist for various areas of creation (songs, theater...); they often belong to people other than the authors of the work, such as performers, producers of phonograms, etc.
Some free content licenses take care to also grant related rights to the recipient of the work. There may even be a copyleft provision which states that related works (interpretations, performances, recordings) must be released under the same license as the work.
Access control prohibition
Some licenses contain a clause, which forbids to control access to the licensed content. In some licenses this clause concerns only the licensee (licensor can use access control systems to forbid not granted rights).
→ DRM
Worldwide applicability
When distributing a free work over the world, it is important to understand how people from other countries will be able to reuse this work.
License writers have adopted three different strategies regarding the internationalization of their licenses:
- same license for everyone: only the original license text (often in English) is given legal value, and translations may be provided purely for information purposes;
- exact translations: translations of the original license text are provided, which all have legal value; those translations have exactly the same clauses and wording as the original text;
- local adaptations: the license is rewritten according to each national legal system.
Attention: some licenses use a specific national law: so you cannot interpret the license through your national law, but through the law specified in the license. For example, Free Art License uses French law (you must pay attention to French law also if the license is written in English, German or other languages).
The two first schemes ensure that everyone is given the same rights. In the third scheme (local adaptations), similarity and equivalence of the different versions should be carefully examined.
According to advocates of the adaptation scheme, licenses must be rewritten in order to cope with the peculiarities of the various legal systems. This position is held by the Creative Commons organization.
According to opponents of the adaptation scheme, having different national versions of a license presents the risk to break trust and interoperability. Also, they stress that the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works provides a framework which, with careful drafting, allows to write internationally applicable license texts. This position is held by the Free Software Foundation and by the Free Art License authors.
List of licenses
Against DRM
- current version: 2.0
- author: Free Creations
- reference URL (English): https://web.archive.org/web/20170327160245/http://www.freecreations.org:80/Against_DRM2.html
- reference URL (Spanish): https://web.archive.org/web/20160702030610/http://www.freecreations.org/Against_DRM2_es1.html
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 permissive (copyfree) 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 occurrence 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.
CC0 Public Domain Dedication
CERN OHL
The CERN Open Hardware License (CERN OHL) is a license used in open-source hardware projects (OSHW).
Creative Commons Attribution
Design Science License
- Not maintained anymore
- License text (English)
FreeBSD Documentation License
- author: FreeBSD Project
- reference URL: http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-doc-license.html
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
- Aliases: License Arte Libre, FAL, LAL
- Current version: 1.3
- author: Copyleft Attitude
- License text (English, version 1.3)
- License text (French)
GNU Free Documentation License
- Aliases: GNU FDL, GFDL, FDL
- Current version: 1.3
- License text (English)
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
- Aliases: GNU GPL, GPL
- Current version: 3.0
- Author: Free Software Foundation
- License text (English)
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 occurrences of text or graphics released under the GPL.
Lizenz für Freie Inhalte
- Aliases: LFFI
- License Text (German)
AFAIK only used by the german portal neppstar for free music and video. Anyway, it seems to be a valid free license.
MirOS Licence
- Aliases: MirBSD, MirOS
- reference URL: http://mirbsd.de/MirOS-Licence
- other conformance: DFSG, OSD (OSI approved), OKD (OKFN approved)
This licence is intended as the European variant of the BSD/MIT licences, but applicable as widely as possible. It shifts focus away from code/software by using the generic term “work” (of authorship), and as such can be used for mostly everything (code, documentation, audiovisual content, possibly others; for example fonts in jurisdictions where they are protected by copyright law). It’s intended as a permissive or "Copycenter" licence (so no copyleft, as that would be a restriction; basically “do what you want, leave me alone, but give due credits”) with as few strings as possible attached (so no “forced freedom” anti-DRM clauses, etc.) and weighs in less than one Kibibyte. Most permissions are enumerated, but the grant is not limited to them. Attribution is required by retaining the copyright notices, licence and disclaimer (this is not a copyleft though) or reproducing it in the accompanying documents (the BSD world is all about credits being given but freedom being unrestricted and not enforced). The disclaimer’s wording has been modified to meet certain European law requirements.
MIT License
- author: MIT
- reference URL: http://www.opensource.org/osi3.0/licenses/mit-license.php
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.
Open Publication License
The Open Publication License (OPL) was among the earliest open-content licenses -- it predates the 2002 GFDL by over 3 years.
The Fedora project selected the OPL for their documentation. (At various times, the Fedora project released their documentation under the GNU FDL, the OPL, and CC-by-SA. See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Archive:Relicensing_OPL_to_CC_BY_SA?rd=Relicensing_OPL_to_CC_BY_SA http://iquaid.org/2009/07/06/why-relicense-fedora-documentation-and-wiki-content/ for details).
Open Source Hardware
Open Source Hardware OSHW is apparently "a standard by which to evaluate licenses for hardware designs".