Examples of license in the following topics:
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- This section is intended to be a very quick, very rough guide to choosing a license.
- Read Licenses, Copyrights, and Patents to understand the detailed legal implications of the different licenses, and how the license you choose can affect people's ability to mix your software with other software.
- The terms "free software license" and "open source license" are essentially synonymous, and I treat them so throughout this book.
- In some cases, one or the other organization has simply not gotten around to considering a given license, usually a license that is not widely-used anyway.
- There are a great many free software licenses to choose from.
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- If you're comfortable with your project's code potentially being used in proprietary programs, then use an MIT/X-style license.
- It is the simplest of several minimal licenses that do little more than assert nominal copyright (without actually restricting copying) and specify that the code comes with no warranty.
- See the section called "The MIT / X Window System License" for details.
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- When choosing a license to apply to your project, if at all possible use an existing license instead of making up a new one.
- There are two reasons why existing licenses are better:
- If you use one of the three or four most popular licenses, people won't feel they have to read the legalese in order to use your code, because they'll have already done so for that license a long time ago.
- Unless you have a team of lawyers at your disposal, you are unlikely to come up with a legally solid license.
- To apply one of these licenses to your project, see the section called "How to Apply a License to Your Software" in Getting Started.
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- This is the most accommodating of licenses offered.
- CC BY-SA is the license used by Wikipedia and is recommended for materials that incorporate content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.
- This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works under the same license.
- This is the most restrictive Creative Commons license.
- In writing our textbooks, we use sources under a variety of open licenses (Creative Commons, General Public License, Free Art License, Public Domain, etc.), but we relicense everything on our site under CC-BY-SA 4.0, the most recent Creative Commons ShareAlike license.
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- A fair amount of open source software is distributed under a BSD license (or sometimes a BSD-style license).
- This license (the exact text may be seen in section 2.2.2 of xfree86.org/3.3.6/COPYRIGHT2.html#6) was similar in spirit to the MIT/X license, except for one clause:
- The result is the revised BSD license, which is simply the original BSD license with the advertising clause removed.
- However, there is perhaps one reason to prefer the revised BSD license to the MIT/X license, which is that the BSD includes this clause:
- If you wish to use the most recent revised BSD license, a template is available at opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause.
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- The Creative Commons licenses—including CC BY-SA, which Boundless uses—support the creation, usage, and exchange of openly licensed materials.
- We use materials under licenses such as CC BY, CC BY-SA, public domain (PD), and more, all of which are compatible with our own CC BY-SA license.
- The core Creative Commons license is CC BY ("Creative Commons Attribution"), and various abbreviations can be appended to this license to signify additional restrictions (e.g., CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC-ND, etc.).
- The GNU Project gave rise to the General Public License (GNU GPL) for software and the Free Documentation License (GNU FDL) for other works, which guarantees users the freedoms to use, study, share (copy), and modify the work.
- The Free Art License is of French origin; in French, its name is "License ARt Libre."
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- By far the sharpest dividing line in licensing is that between proprietary-incompatible and proprietary-compatible licenses, that is, between the GNU General Public License and everything else.
- Specifically, among the GPL's requirements (see fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl.html for its full text) are these two:
- The GPL is by far the most popular open source license; at one point Freecode had it at 68%, with the next highest license at 6%.
- Most of the GPL-compatible open source licenses are also proprietary-compatible: that is, code under such a license can be used in a GPLed program, and it can be used in a proprietary program.
- Fortunately, the Free Software Foundation maintains a list showing which licenses are compatible with the GPL and which are not, at gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html.
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- Creative Commons licenses are based on but do not replace copyrights.
- This license is the most accommodating of licenses offered.
- Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials .
- This license is often compared to "copyleft" free and open source software licenses.
- This license is used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects .
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- Some free licenses allow the covered code to be used in proprietary programs.
- The Apache License, X Consortium License, BSD-style license, and the MIT-style license are all examples of proprietary-compatible licenses.
- Most free licenses are compatible with each other, meaning that code under one license can be combined with code under another, and the result distributed under either license without violating the terms of the other.
- The GPL is compatible with some free licenses, but not with others.
- Both the GNU General Public License version 3 and the Apache License version 2 contain language designed to prevent people from using patent law to take away the rights granted (under copyright law) by the licenses.