11/25/2020 Free license - Wikipedia

Free license
A free license or open license[1][2] is a license agreement which contains provisions that allow other individuals to reuse another
creator's work, giving them four major freedoms. Without a special license, these uses are normally prohibited by copyright law or
commercial license. Most free licenses are worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and perpetual (see copyright durations). Free licenses
are often the basis of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding projects.

The invention of the term "free license" and the focus on the rights of users were connected to the sharing traditions of the hacker culture
of the 1970s public domain software ecosystem, the social and political free software movement (since 1980) and the open source
movement (since the 1990s).[3] These rights were codified by different groups and organizations for different domains in Free Software
Definition, Open Source Definition, Debian Free Software Guidelines, Definition of Free Cultural Works and The Open Definition.[1] These
definitions were then transformed into licenses, using the copyright as legal mechanism. Since then, ideas of free/open licenses spread into
different spheres of society.

Open source, free culture (unified as free and open-source movement), anticopyright, Wikimedia Foundation projects, public domain
advocacy groups and pirate parties are connected with free and open licenses.

Contents
Philosophy
Classification and licenses
By freedom
By type of content
By authors
Problems
USA
European Union
Germany
References
External links

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Philosophy

Classification and licenses

By freedom
Agreement, which is related to the public domain
Creative Commons CC0
WTFPL
Unlicense
Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL)[4]
Permissive licenses Network of licenses (and years of license
creation).
BSD License
MIT License
Mozilla Public License (file-based permissive copyleft)
Creative Commons Attribution
Copyleft licenses
GNU GPL, LGPL (weaker copyleft), AGPL (stronger copyleft)
Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike
Mozilla Public License
Common Development and Distribution License
GFDL (without invariant sections)
Free Art License

By type of content
Free software licences
The Free Software Definition
Open Content
Open Content License
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Open Publication License

Free content licenses
Definition of Free Cultural Works
Open-source hardware licenses
Database licenses (Creative Commons v4 and Open Database Licence)
Open patent licenses

By authors
Free Software Foundation
Open Source Initiative
Creative Commons
Microsoft
Microsoft Public License
Microsoft Reciprocal License
Open Content Project
Open Data Commons from Open Knowledge Foundation
Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL)
Attribution License (ODC-By)
Open Database License (ODC-ODbL)

Problems
License compatibility
License proliferation
Permissive free software Commons has affiliates in more than 100 jurisdictions all over the world.

USA

European Union

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EUPL was created in the European Union.

Germany

Harald Welte created gpl-violations.org

References
1. Open Definition 2.1 (http://opendefinition.org/od/2.1/en/) on opendefinition.org "This essential meaning matches that of “open” with
respect to software as in the Open Source Definition and is synonymous with “free” or “libre” as in the Free Software Definition and
Definition of Free Cultural Works."
2. The Open Source Definition (http://opensource.org/docs/osd)
3. Kelty, Christpher M. (2018). "The Cultural Significance of free Software - Two Bits" (http://twobits.net/pub/Kelty-TwoBits.pdf) (PDF).
Duke University press - durham and london. p. 99. "Prior to 1998, Free Software referred either to the Free Software Foundation (and
the watchful, micromanaging eye of Stallman) or to one of thousands of different commercial, avocational, or university-research
projects, processes, licenses, and ideologies that had a variety of names: sourceware, freeware, shareware, open software, public
domain software, and so on. The term Open Source, by contrast, sought to encompass them all in one movement."
4. PDDL 1.0 (http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/1-0/) on opendatacommons.org

External links
Various Licenses and Comments about Them - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.h
tml)
License information - Debian (http://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/)
Open Source Licenses (http://opensource.org/licenses/)
Licenses - Definition of Free Cultural Works (http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses)
proposed Open Source Hardware (OSHW) Statement of Principles and Definition v1.0 (http://freedomdefined.org/OSHW)

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