Guide:Licensing

Getting your head round different licences can be a real pain, and most of us don't even bother. But I'm gunna use this page to try to make sense of them.

TBH if someone goes against the licence you apply to your software you probably can't afford to do anything about it, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Broad Summary

I like this summation I read on Mastodon:

[...] the difference between FOSS licenses isn't really about how much freedom they grant but who gets that freedom.
e.g. GPL/AGPL focuses on end-user freedom, MIT/BSD focuses on developer freedom, and Apache/MPL tries to find a compromise between the two.
— @alcinnz@floss.social

GPL and AGPL

Copyleft, user-centric in that they require any work done with the code to also be contributable back to the original source.

MIT and BSD

Permissive, developer-centric in that it allows people to use the code to make new software and change the licence or make money or whatever.

Unlicence and CC0

Public domain, giving full permission for people to do whatever they wish.

Creative Commons

Actually a bunch of licences with somewhat granular control of which rights you wish to include.

See Also

• unlicense.org
• choosealicense.com
• opensource.org/licenses
• Quick Guide to Creative Commons - Mastodon thread, by @luka@mastodon.art
• copyleft-next - In-development, alternative copyleft licence.
  • Notes sent to the Fedora mailing list
• My Lawyer is an Artist: Free Culture Licenses as Art Manifestos, by Aymeric Mansoux.