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What are licences?

A license is the permission granted by the copyright holder that governs the use of their work. 

Some licenses are given freely by the copyright holders, while others need to be purchased. The Creative Commons set of licenses, for example, are free.

Creative Commons (CC) Licences

Creative Commons (CC) is the most often used of the free licences. According to Copyrightalliance.org a Creative Commons license is issued by the copyright owner to allow anyone anywhere to use a work in certain specified ways without having to ask for permission. 

There are four components to the licences: 

  • BY - attribution required 
  • NC - no commercial use 
  • ND - no derivative works 
  • SA - Share Alike - the license must be the same on any derivative works.

The followings are the types of CC Licences: 

Licence

Commercial use permitted

Modifications permitted

Attribution required

Remark

CC0 (Public Domain Dedication)

Yes

Yes

No

Recommended for Works, other than software

CC BY 4.0

Yes

Yes

Yes

CC BY-SA 4.0 (Attribution-ShareAlike)

Yes

Share-alike

Yes

CC BY-ND 4.0 (Attribution-NoDerivatives)

Yes

No

Yes

CC BY-NC 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial)

No

Yes

Yes

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike)

No

Share-alike

Yes

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives)

No

No

Yes

Other types of free Licences

 

License

Commercial use permitted

Modifications permitted

Attribution required

Remark

MIT

Yes

Yes

Yes

Recommended for code & software

Apache

Yes

Yes

Yes

GPL (General Public License) 3.0

Yes

Yes

Yes