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Open Source Licenses

As of today, there are many, many open source licenses out in the wild. Wikipedia[1] lists 89 pages (as of writing). GNU lists also a lot.[2] Let’s get some help, to choose the right one.

License Abbreviation

“GPL”, “MIT”, and abbreviations as such are standardized by now by SPDX[3].

Choosing

A good page for starters is choosealicense.com.[4] Licenes are sorted by the permissions they grant.

No License

No License means no permissions granted. This is the opposite of free.

Public Domain, Unlicense, CC0, and similar

Public Domain is not available in every country. Thus an alternative permissive license is requried. choosealicense suggests the “Unlicense” for that case.[5] GNU on the other hand suggests to pick the CC0[6] over the Unlicense:

If you want to release your work to the public domain, we recommend you use CC0. CC0 also provides a public domain dedication with a fallback license, and is more thorough and mature than the Unlicense. [7]

This goes even if other licenses of Creative Commons are not recomended for software.[8] CC0 is an exception.[9]

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Free_and_open-source_software_licenses ↩︎

  2. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html ↩︎

  3. https://spdx.org/licenses/ ↩︎

  4. https://choosealicense.com/ ↩︎

  5. https://choosealicense.com/licenses/unlicense/ ↩︎

  6. https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode ↩︎

  7. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Unlicense ↩︎

  8. https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-software ↩︎

  9. https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#May_I_apply_CC0_to_computer_software.3F_If_so.2C_is_there_a_recommended_implementation.3F ↩︎