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Licensing guide: How to choose a license

Table of contents

Reasoning

foundata is driven by 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 to achieve results. 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 at all, even if nobody plans to modify anything. We still prefer free copyleft licenses as long as it fits into the ecosystem of a project as we do not care about corporate-anti-oss use cases.

Licenses to choose from

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The following licenses are well-known and all of them allow commercial and private use, modification and distribution and instruct that copyright and license notices must be preserved. The main differences between them are copyleft, what a third party has to do with modifications or when embedding a work into another existing project (a "larger work") and if they are suitable for software. We prefer copyleft over permissive licenses.

Our defaults for software projects are:

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

However, many projects exist in a wider ecosystem with a license preferred by the community, usually aligned with the main project or product if so. Take this into account when choosing a license. Have a look at existing repositories and/or search the web for <project> licensing requirements to get an impression.

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

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A strong copyleft license:

  • Copyright and license notices must be preserved.
  • Modifications have to 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:

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:

  • Copyright and license notices must be preserved.
  • Modifications have to 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:

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:

  • Copyright and license notices must be preserved.
  • Modifications have to 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:

  • 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:

Used by / default for:

Further reading:

MIT License (MIT)

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A permissive and simple license:

Used by / default for:

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:

Used by / default for:

Further reading:

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

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A permissive license:

Further reading:

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.