Category:Licensing
Introduction
Licensing is giving permission for someone to use something. This category of the P2P Foundation Wiki covers a number of different aspects of licensing including reviews of licenses and licensing groups that serve creators throughout the world.
- Guide to Open Content Licenses
- Introduction to Creative Commons Licenses
- Choosing and Using Free Licenses for Software, Hardware, and Aesthetic works
Christian Siefkes on the three freedoms characteristic of Copyleft licenses:
- The freedom to use the work for any purpose.
- The freedom to study the work and to change it to make it to do what you wish.
- The freedom to distribute and share the work with others, so that the whole community may benefit.
Combinations of the three freedoms must be possible, too. The Free Software Definition specifies a fourth freedom that combines the preceding two (distribute modified versions).
Copyleft ensures that the three freedoms will also hold for all derived works: I may only published derivative versions if I give all their users the same rights." (http://www.keimform.de/2010/self-organized-plenty/)
Important article: Defining Open Content Licenses; Stephen Downes in defense of the non-commercial clause, at http://www.downes.ca/files/FreeLearning.pdf (pp. 122+)
Status
"Our licenses aren't working anymore"
Bruce Perens:
"Our licenses aren't working anymore," he said. "We've had enough time that businesses have found all of the loopholes and thus we need to do something new. The GPL is not acting the way the GPL should have done when one-third of all paid-for Linux systems are sold with a GPL circumvention. That's RHEL." (RHEL stands for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which in June, under IBM's ownership, stopped making its source code available as required under the GPL.)"
(https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/27/bruce_peren)
Typology
- Jordan Hatcher, in an interview with Richard Poynder:
" I see free and open licence development as happening within three tranches, all related to a specific area of use.
1. FOSS for software.
Alongside the GPL, there have been a number of licences developed since the birth of the movement (and continuing to today), all aimed at software. These licences work best for software and tend to fall over when applied to other areas.
2. Open licences and Public licences for content.
These are aimed at content, such as video, images, music, and so on. Creative Commons is certainly the most popular, but definitely not the first. The birth of CC does however represent a watershed moment in thinking about open licensing for content.
I distinguish open licences from public licences here, mostly because Creative Commons is so popular. Open has so many meanings to people (as do “free”) that it is critical to define from a legal perspective what is meant when one says “open”. The Open Knowledge Definition does this, and states that “open” means users have the right to use, reuse, and redistribute the content with very few restrictions — only attribution and share-alike are allowed restrictions, and commercial use must specifically be allowed.
The Open Definition means that only two out of the main six CC licences are open content licences — CC-BY and CC-BY-SA. The other four involve the No Derivatives (ND) restriction (thus prohibiting reuse) or have Non Commercial (NC) restrictions. The other four are what I refer to as “public licences”; in other words they are licences provided for use by the general public.
Of course CC’s public domain tools, such as CC0, all meet the Open Definition as well because they have no restrictions on use, reuse, and redistribution.
I wrote about this in a bit more detail recently on my blog.
3. Open Data Licences.
Databases are different from content and software — they are a little like both in what users want to do with them and how licensors want to protect them, but are different from software and content in both the legal rights that apply and how database creators want to use open data licences.
As a result, there’s a need for specific open data licences, which is why we founded Open Data Commons. Today we have three tools available. It’s a new area of open licensing and we’re all still trying to work out all the questions and implications." (http://poynder.blogspot.com/2010/10/interview-with-jordan-hatcher.html)
Key Quotes
"Why is it a problem that the concepts of free software and open source are intrinsically tied to licenses? It’s that the aims and goals of both of these movements are about distribution and therefore consumption, but what people care about most today is about the production of software. Software licences regulate distribution, but cannot regulate production. (technically they can, but practically, they can’t. I get into this below.) This is also the main challenge of whatever comes after open source; they cannot rely on the legal tactics of the last generation. I don’t have solutions here."
- Steve Blatnik [1]
Key Resources
Related Sections
Audio & Video
- Brian Newman on Online Distribution and Creative Licenses
- Eben Moglen on Document Licenses and GPL3 ; Eben Moglen on Open Licenses in a Web Services Era
- Joi Ito on Commons-based Licenses and Games
- Ragavan Srinivasan on Open Licenses in Education
Essays and Reports
- Creative Commons is to Free Culture what Shareware is to Free Software. Dmytri Kleiner.
- Report: Fred von Lohmann, A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing, April 2008 [2]
- Article: Bonvoisin, J. et al., (2017). What is the “Source” of Open Source Hardware?. Journal of Open Hardware. 1(1), p.5.
Licenses per Domain
Creativity, Art & Music
Education
Equity-based Licenses
- Common Good Public License
- Copyfarleft
- Ecopyleft
- Equitable Access Licensing
- Equitable Open Source
- Equity-based Licenses
- IANG License
Free Network Services
Open Data Licenses
Aimed at placing work into the public domain. The public domain has a very specific meaning in a legal context: It means that there are no copyright or other IP rights over the work
- Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL)
- Public Doman Dedication Certificate (PDDC)
- Creative Commons Zero
Also:
- ODbL
- ODC-Attribution licence
Open Design and Manufacturing / Hardware
- Recommended Open Hardware Licenses
- Open Design License Agreement
- Open Hardware Licenses
- TAPR Open Hardware License
- CERN Open Hardware License
- Talis Community License
- Three-Dimensional Printing Open License
Other
Pages in category "Licensing"
The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 242 total.
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C
- Cambalache/es
- Canonical Contributor Agreement
- CERN Open Hardware License
- Certified Open Hardware Licenses
- Cine CC donostia/es
- Clear Bits
- Click-Use Licences
- Common Good Public License
- Commons Clause
- Commons Management Agreement
- Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses
- Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses To Advance Reciprocity for the Commons
- Community Reporter Social Licence
- Contributive Commons as Tools for Reciprocity
- Contributor Covenant
- Contributor License Agreement
- CoopCycle
- Coopyright
- Copyfair
- CopyFair License
- Copyfarleft
- Copyfarleft and Copyjustright
- Copyleft
- Copyleft for Housing
- Copyright and Open Source
- Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons
- Copyright-Based Licenses
- Copysol License
- Creative Archive License
- Creative Barcode
- Creative Commons
- Creative Commons 4.0
- Creative Commons in Open Design
- Creative Commons is to Free Culture what Shareware is to Free Software
- Creative Commons NonCommercial License
- Creative Commons Rights Expression Language
- Creator-Endorsed Mark
- Critique of the Peer Production License
- Crown Copyright
- Cryptographic Autonomy License
- CSTART Social Contract
D
- Data Commons for Food Security
- Data Commons License
- Data Portability Licenses
- Debate about the Copyfair Proposals of the P2P Foundation
- Decentralized Autonomous Licence
- Defensive Aggregators
- Defensive Patent License
- Defensive Patent Pool for Open Source Projects and Businesses
- Defining Open Content Licenses
- Design Rights
- Do No Harm License
- Dual Licensing
- Dual Licensing in the Open Source Software Industry
- Dynamic Royalty License
E
- Eben Moglen on Document Licenses and GPL3
- Eben Moglen on Open Licenses in a Web Services Era
- Ecopyleft
- Eli Greenbaum on 3D Printing Open Hardware Licenses
- Employee Owned Source Code
- Enter Colaboratorio Copyleft/es
- Equitable Access and Neglected Disease Licensing
- Equitable Access Licensing
- Equitable Health Research Licensing
- Equitable Open Source
- Equity-based Licenses
- Eric Frank on Openly-Licensed Textbooks
- Ethical Source Movement
- Ethical Source Software
- European Opensource and Free Software Law Event
- European Public License
- Extended Fair Uses Public License
F
- Fab Mob Reciprocal License for the Legal Contractualisation of Commons
- Fair Commons Generic License
- Fair Source
- Fair Source License
- Fair Source Licenses
- FairlyShare
- Farmers Rights and Open Source Licensing
- Festival de Cine Creative Commons Ciudad de México/es
- Flat World Knowledge
- Foss Licensing Primer
- Free and Open Source Licenses in Community Life
- Free Art License
- Free Music Public License
- Free Sheet Music License
G
- Gene Patents and Collaborative Licensing Models
- General Political License
- General Public Licence for Plant Germplasm
- General Public License for Plant Germplasm
- Genero Initiative
- Global License
- GNU Affero General Public License
- GNU Free Documentation License
- GNU General Public License
- GNU Lesser General Public License
- GPL Violations
- Guide to Open Content Licenses
- Guidelines for Free System Distributions
I
J
L
O
- OER Licensing Models
- Open Architecture
- Open Attribute
- Open Content Licenses
- Open Content Licensing From Theory to Practice
- Open Copyright License
- Open Data
- Open Data Commons
- Open Data Licenses
- Open Design Circuits
- Open Design Definition
- Open Design Foundation
- Open Design License Agreement
- Open Education License
- Open Government License
- Open Hardware License
- Open Hardware Licenses
- Open Hardware Specification Project
- Open Invention Network
- Open IP Licensing Guaranteed by Non-Profits
- Open Knowledge Stack
- Open License
- Open Licensed Digital Media
- Open Licenses
- Open Licensing for Scientific Innovation
- Open Money License
- Open Patent Certification Mark
- Open Patent License
- Open Patent Movement
- Open Patents
- Open Permissions Platform
- Open Publication License
- Open Science Licenses
- Open Source Architecture License
- Open Source Assurance Agreement
- Open Source Drug Discovery
- Open Source Drug Discovery Attribution and Authorship Policy
- Open Source Hardware Definition
- Open Source Licenses
- Open Source Licenses Summarized and Explained in Plain English
- Open Source Licensing as a Legal and Economic Modality for the Dissemination of Renewable Energy
- Open Source Licensing Strategies
- Open Source Seeds Initiative
- Open Source Seeds License
- Open Source Voting License
- Open Trademarks
- Open Unified Registry with Public License
- OSHW 2010 Summit Panel on Open Hardware Licenses and Norms
- Owning the Right to Open Up Access to Scientific Publications
P
- Pando
- Patent Tools Commons
- Patentleft
- Peer Production License
- People’s Ethical Appropriation Reciprocity License
- Permissive Free Software License
- Permissive Open Source Licenses vs Copyleft Licenses
- Plants, Property, and the Promise of Open Source Biology
- Post-Open Licenses
- Power of Open
- Pragmatic Critique of the Peer Production License