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License

License is a legal text by which we share some of our exclusive rights (e.g. copyright) over intellectual works with others. For the purpose of this Wiki a license is what enables us to legally implement free (as in freedom) software (as well as free culture): we attach a license to our program that says that we grant to everyone the basic freedom rights to our software with optional conditions (which must not be in conflict with free software definition, e.g. we may require attribution or copyleft, but we may NOT require e.g. non-commercial use only). We call these licenses free licenses (open source licenses work the same way). Of course, there also exist non-free licenses called EULAs, but we stay away from these.

At LRS we highly prefer public domain waivers instead of licenses, i.e. we release our works without any conditions/restrictions whatsoever (e.g. we don't require credit, copyleft and similar conditions, even if by free software rules we could). This is because we oppose the very idea of being able to own information and ideas, which any license is inherently based on. Besides that, licenses are not as legally suckless as public domain and they come with their own issues, for example a license, even if free, may require that you promote some political ideology you disagree with (see e.g. the principle of +NIGGER).

Some most notable free licenses for software include (FSF: FSF approved, OSI: OSI approved, LRS: approved by us, short: is the license short?):

license type FSF OSI LRS short
Apache 2 permissive, conditions + + - -
AGPL network copyleft + + - -
BSD (0,1,2,3) permissive + + - +
BOML permissive - - - +
CC0 PD waiver, 0 conditions + - + -
GPLv2, GPLv3 copyleft (strong) + + - -
LGPL copyleft (weak) + + - -
MIT permissive, credit + + + +
MIT-0 permissive, 0 conditions - + + +
Unlicense PD waiver, 0 conditions + + + +
WTFPL permissive, fun + - - +
zlib permissive + + - +
0BSD permissive, 0 conditions - + + +

Some most notable free licenses for general artworks include:

TODO

How To

If you're a noob or even an advanced noob and want to make sure you license correctly, consider the following advice:


All content available under CC0 1.0 (public domain). Send comments and corrections to drummyfish at disroot dot org.