Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. The Creative Commons licenses enable the sharing and use of creativity, knowledge, and content in a structure that is accessible to the general public, not just copyright lawyers.
Creative Commons has revolutionized the process of sharing information. "Open" resources available under a CC license broaden the distribution of knowledge; as more content becomes more accessible under open licenses, the pool of high-quality educational materials will continue to grow.
The Creative Commons Licenses
CC BY (Attribution)
This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.
CC BY-SA (Attribution-Share Alike)
The CC BY-SA license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon an author's work, including for commercial purposes, as long as they credit the author properly and license their new version under CC BY-SA as well. CC BY-SA is the license used by Wikipedia and is recommended for materials that incorporate content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.
CC BY-NC (Attribution-Noncommercial)
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.
CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike)
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
CC BY-ND (Attribution-No Derivatives)
This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as your work is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.
CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives)
This is the most restrictive Creative Commons license. It allows others to download your work and share it with others, as long as they credit you, but they cannot use it commercially or change it in any way.
Boundless and CC BY-SA
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. This means Boundless content is free to be redistributed, remixed, and built upon, as long as it is shared under the same license.