This wizard is designed to help beginner developers identify the most suitable open source license for their project.
If you are working in a community or on a project, please don't choose any license. Just use that project's license.
To find out what is a community and where to find their license, Read more about community
Follow the wizard to narrow down your options based on your requirements or wishes. You can skip questions if you are not sure. To see a table of all licenses, visit appendix page. Read more about the purpose of this site.
All open source licenses grant to the public permissions to do things with licensed works which copyright or other IP laws might disallow.
Most open source licenses' grants of permissions are subject to compliance with conditions.
Most open source licenses have limitations that disclaim warranty and liability, or exclude patents or trademarks from licenses' grants.
If you understand what all these clauses mean, then use these filters and skip the wizard.
The BSD Zero Clause license goes further than the BSD 2-Clause license to allow you unlimited freedom with the software without requirements to include the copyright notice, license text, or disclaimer in either source or binary forms.
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The Academic Free License is a variant of the Open Software License that does not require that the source code of derivative works be disclosed. It contains explicit copyright and patent grants and reserves trademark rights in the author.
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A permissive license whose main conditions require preservation of copyright and license notices. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. Licensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code.
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Heavily favored by the Perl community, the Artistic license requires that modified versions of the software do not prevent users from running the standard version.
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A permissive license whose main conditions require providing notice of the license. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. Licensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code.
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A permissive license that comes in two variants, the BSD 2-Clause and BSD 3-Clause. Both have very minute differences to the MIT license.
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This license is designed to provide: a) a simple permissive license; b) that is compatible with the GNU GPL-2.0; and c) which also has an express patent grant included.
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A permissive license similar to the BSD 2-Clause License, but with a 3rd clause that prohibits others from using the name of the copyright holder or its contributors to promote derived products without written consent.
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A variant of the BSD 3-Clause License that explicitly does not grant any patent rights.
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A permissive license similar to the BSD 3-Clause License, but with an "advertising clause" that requires an acknowledgment of the original source in all advertising material.
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A simple permissive license only requiring preservation of copyright and license notices for source (and not binary) distribution. Licensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code.
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Strong copyleft license made by three French public research organisations, CEA, CNRS, and Inria, compatible with AGPL-3.0, EUPL-1.1, and GPL-2.0, or later versions of those licenses.
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The Educational Community License version 2.0 ("ECL") consists of the Apache 2.0 license, modified to change the scope of the patent grant in section 3 to be specific to the needs of the education communities using this license.
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This commercially-friendly copyleft license provides the ability to commercially license binaries; a modern royalty-free patent license grant; and the ability for linked works to use other licenses, including commercial ones.
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This commercially-friendly copyleft license provides the ability to commercially license binaries; a modern royalty-free patent license grant; and the ability for linked works to use other licenses, including commercial ones.
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The European Union Public Licence (EUPL) is a copyleft free/open source software license created on the initiative of and approved by the European Commission in 23 official languages of the European Union.
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Permissions of this strongest copyleft license are conditioned on making available complete source code of licensed works and modifications, which include larger works using a licensed work, under the same license. Copyright and license notices must be preserved. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. When a modified version is used to provide a service over a network, the complete source code of the modified version must be made available.
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The GNU GPL is the most widely used free software license and has a strong copyleft requirement. When distributing derived works, the source code of the work must be made available under the same license. There are multiple variants of the GNU GPL, each with different requirements.
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Permissions of this strong copyleft license are conditioned on making available complete source code of licensed works and modifications, which include larger works using a licensed work, under the same license. Copyright and license notices must be preserved. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights.
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Primarily used for software libraries, the GNU LGPL requires that derived works be licensed under the same license, but works that only link to it do not fall under this restriction. There are two commonly used versions of the GNU LGPL.
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Permissions of this copyleft license are conditioned on making available complete source code of licensed works and modifications under the same license or the GNU GPLv3. Copyright and license notices must be preserved. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. However, a larger work using the licensed work through interfaces provided by the licensed work may be distributed under different terms and without source code for the larger work.
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A permissive license lets people do anything with your code with proper attribution and without warranty. The ISC license is functionally equivalent to the BSD 2-Clause and MIT licenses, removing some language that is no longer necessary.
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The LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL) is the primary license under which the LaTeX kernel and the base LaTeX packages are distributed.
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A short and simple permissive license with conditions only requiring preservation of copyright and license notices. Licensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code.
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A short and simple permissive license with no conditions, not even requiring preservation of copyright and license notices. Licensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code.
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Permissions of this weak copyleft license are conditioned on making available source code of licensed files and modifications of those files under the same license (or in certain cases, one of the GNU licenses). Copyright and license notices must be preserved. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. However, a larger work using the licensed work may be distributed under different terms and without source code for files added in the larger work.
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An open source license with a patent grant.
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An open source license with a patent grant similar to the Microsoft Public License, with the additional condition that any source code for any derived file be provided under this license.
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A permissive license similar to the Apache License, but explicitly states that it does not grant trademark rights. Mulan Permissive Software License is the first open source license in both Chinese and English approved by OSI.
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The University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License, or UIUC license, is a permissive free software license, based on the MIT/X11 license and the BSD 3-clause License. Its conditions include requiring the preservation of copyright and license notices both in source and in binary distributions and the prohibition of using the names of the authors or the project organization to promote or endorse derived products.
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A license with no conditions whatsoever which dedicates works to the public domain. Unlicensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code.
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A short permissive license, compatible with GPL. Requires altered source versions to be documented as such.
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A very short, BSD-style license, used specifically for PostgreSQL.
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OSL 3.0 is a copyleft license that does not require reciprocal licensing on linked works. It also provides an express grant of patent rights from contributors to users, with a termination clause triggered if a user files a patent infringement lawsuit.
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The easiest license out there. It gives the user permissions to do whatever they want with your code.
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The Open Database License (ODbL) is a license agreement intended to allow users to freely share, modify, and use a database while maintaining this same freedom for others.
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A permissive, OSI- and FSF-approved, GPL-compatible license, expressly allowing attribution with just a copyright notice and a short form link rather than the full text of the license. Includes an express grant of patent rights. Licensed works and modifications may be distributed under different terms and without source code, and the patent grant may also optionally be expanded to larger works to permit use as a contributor license agreement.
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There are no restrictions on using or distributing an unmodified copy of the software. Parts of the software may also be distributed, but the license text must always be included. For modified versions a few restrictions apply. The license is GPL compatible, you may compile the software with GPL libraries and distribute it.
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If there are no licenses below, please edit your answers or filters, for example, remove some of the conditions