







the free for open software license


Sorting out the Ethical Licensing Mess
Software developers who give the world, for free, usage rights to the code they write often use open source licenses to make this gift legally explicit. These free usage rights (and then some) are …

Introducing the Permissive License Stack
We believe open-source values are critical to free societies, especially in the digital age. To that end, we’ve created a new approach to licensing invoking the principles of the Default Open Pledge

RSL: Really Simple Licensing
The open content licensing standard for the AI-first Internet

The Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS) License Slide
There are a large number of Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS) licenses, but only a few are widely used. The widely-used licenses tend to be compatible, i.e., the software can be combined to produce a larger work. The following “license slide” figure makes it easy to see when common licenses can be combined:

Everything an open source maintainer might need to know about open source licensing | Ben Balter
There's lots of internet lore around open source licensing. An attorney and open source developer answers the most common questions.



Licenses – Open Source Initiative
The content on this website, of which Opensource.org is the author, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.Opensource.org is not the author of any of the licenses reproduced on this site. Questions about the copyright in a license should be directed to the license steward. Read our Privacy Policy
Time for Net Giants to Pay Fairly for the Open Source on Which They Depend | Linux Journal
Licensing lies at the heart of open source. Arguably, free software began with the publication of the GNU GPL in 1989. And since then, open-source projects are defined as such by virtue of the licenses they adopt and whether the latter meet the Open Source Definition. The continuing importance of licensing is shown by the periodic flame wars that erupt in this area. Recently, there have been two such flarings of strong feelings, both of which raise important issues.


Supporting open source with 3% of our revenue | Hacker News
> SPI acts as a fiscal sponsor to many free and open source projects ... we encourage programmers to use the GNU General Public License or other licenses that allow free redistribution and use of software and hardware developers to distribute documentation that will allow device drivers to be written for their product ... all donations made to SPI and its supported projects are tax deductible for donors in the United States.