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Licensing guide: How to choose a license

Table of contents

Licenses to choose from

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Our defaults for software projects are:

Our defaults for projects with focus on media, design, 3D-printing plans or physical objects are:

Many projects operate within a broader ecosystem that has a license preferred by the community, often aligned with the primary project or product. Consider this when selecting a license. Check existing repositories or search online for <project> licensing requirements to understand community expectations.

The licenses listed here are widely recognized and all of them allow commercial and private use, modification, and distribution while requiring that copyright and license notices be preserved. The primary differences lie in their treatment of copyleft—specifically, the obligations of third parties regarding modifications or embedding the work into a larger project—and their applicability to software. We favor copyleft over permissive licenses.

GNU General Public License v3.0 or later (GPL-3.0-or-later)

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A strong copyleft license with the following main characteristics:

  • Copyright and license notices must be preserved.
  • Modifications must be released under the same license.
  • Embedding into a larger work is only possible when the larger work is using the same or a compatible license.
  • Listed as free by the FSF
  • OSI Approved

Used by / default for the following:

Further reading:

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later)

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A very strong copyleft license with the following main characteristics:

  • Copyright and license notices must be preserved.
  • Modifications must be released under the same license.
  • Embedding into a larger work is only possible when the larger work is using the same or a compatible license.
  • The source code of a modified version must be made available if it is used to provide a service over a network (e.g. as SaaS).
  • Listed as free by the FSF
  • OSI Approved

Used by / default for the following:

Further reading:

GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 or later (LGPL-3.0-or-later)

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A copyleft license, especially useful for libraries to be used in other software. It has the following main characteristics:

  • Copyright and license notices must be preserved.
  • Modifications must be released under the same license.
  • Embedding into a larger work is possible when
    • the larger work is using the same or a compatible license or
    • the larger work is distributed under different terms and without source code but using the project only through provided interfaces
  • Listed as free by the FSF
  • OSI Approved

Used by / default for the following:

  • 7-Zip (most of it, LGPL 2.1 or later)
  • GTK (LGPL 2.1 or later)

Further reading:

Apache License 2.0 (Apache-2.0)

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A permissive license with the following main characteristics:

Used by / default for the following:

Further reading:

MIT License (MIT)

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A permissive and simple license with the following main characteristics:

Used by / default for the following:

Further reading:

Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International (CC-BY-SA-4.0)

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A strong copyleft license for documents and media files. It has the following main characteristics:

Used by / default for the following:

Further reading:

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0)

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A permissive license with the following main characteristics:

Further reading:

Reasoning

foundata is committed to open source. A good open source license allows reuse of code while retaining copyright. Using well-known licenses also reduces legal mumbo jumbo when working with third-parties, helping you achieve results more efficiently. Therefore you should choose one of the licenses listed in this document whenever possible. We usually only check whether there are obvious reasons against the publication of source code, like confidential contracting work for a customer.

Copyleft licenses like GNU (A)GPL 3.0 or later might prevent some organizations from using a project as they do not want to release the source code of their own modifications. Sadly, corporate compliance sometimes even nonsensically prohibits the usage of copyleft projects altogether, even if nobody plans to modify anything. Nonetheless, we prefer free copyleft licenses whenever they align with a project's ecosystem, as we are not concerned about corporate-anti-oss use cases.

Disclaimer

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  1. This is not legal advice. If in doubt: Ask persons in charge and/or a lawyer as some additional rules might apply (like the Arbeitnehmererfindungsgesetz (ArbnErfG) mentioned in your employment contract).
  2. After choosing and/or applying a license or in any case of uncertainty, communicate with persons in charge for a last check before releasing a new project or repository to the public.