∃Open-Source Licences

From Wikipedia:

Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. [...] Open source promotes universal access via an open-source or free license to a product's design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint.

Licences I would want to use

When choosing an open-source licence, I tend to use the following criteria:

  1. Licence is approved by major FOSS communities:

    • FSF

    • OSI

    • Debian

    • Fedora

  2. Licence text is easily retrievable from SPDX

  3. (preferably) Licence is compatible with GPLv3

  4. Licence is relatively formal

    • That is, I try to avoid licences like WTFPL or Beerware. In case of a legal trouble, it may be problematic to try to appeal using it.

Codeberg has an excellent licence decision diagram.

open-source_licences/codeberg_licence_decision_diagram_flowchart

My current go-to licence is the ISC License: It's equivalent to my other favourite, the BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License (as well as the MIT License), while being even shorter and more descriptive (due to some unnecessary text being removed).

open-source_licences/isc

ISC License (sometimes also known as the OpenBSD License) is a permissive software licence. It allows usage, modification, and distribution while requiring attribution (through inclusion of copyright notice and permission notice).

Applicable licences

Licences, that meet all the criteria, are:

"Licence" vs. "License"

When writing or coding, I use British English for spelling. However, all the aforementioned licences either originated in the USA or use American spelling. The licences' texts should be copied verbatim, so when applying a licence one should use the American spelling. Thus, I use the word "license" when it's found the name or the text of the licence in question.

Wrong: I use the MIT Licence
Correct: As for the licence, I use the MIT/Expat License.
NB! The verb is still spelled "to license"

Extra reads

Subhyphae