Software licenses and Rights

Software licenses and rights granted in context of the copyright according to Mark Webbink. Expanded by freeware and sublicensing.

FOSS licenses

FOSS or “Free and Open Source Software” licenses are proposed and approved by various groups.

The following table compares various features of each license and is a general guide to the terms and conditions of each license. The table lists the permissions and limitations regarding the following subjects:

Linking - linking of the licensed code with code licensed under a different license (e.g. when the code is provided as a library) Distribution - distribution of the code to third parties Modification - modification of the code by a licensee Patent grant - protection of licensees from patent claims made by code contributors regarding their contribution, and protection of contributors from patent claims made by licensees Private use - whether modification to the code must be shared with the community or may be used privately (e.g. internal use by a corporation) Sublicensing - whether modified code may be licensed under a different license (for example a copyright) or must retain the same license under which it was provided Trademark grant - use of trademarks associated with the licensed code or its contributors by a licensee

Creative Commons license

A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of his/her own work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author’s work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.

There are several types of CC licenses. The licenses differ by several combinations that condition the terms of distribution. They were initially released on December 16, 2002 by Creative Commons, a U.S. non-profit corporation founded in 2001. There have also been five versions of the suite of licenses, numbered 1.0 through 4.0.[1] As of July 2017, the 4.0 license suite is the most current.

The CC licenses all grant the “baseline rights”, such as the right to distribute the copyrighted work worldwide for non-commercial purposes, and without modification.[12] The details of each of these licenses depend on the version, and comprises a selection out of four conditions:

Icon	Right	Description
	Attribution (BY)	Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform the work and make derivative works and remixes based on it only if they give the author or licensor the credits (attribution) in the manner specified by these.
	Share-alike (SA)	Licensees may distribute derivative works only under a license identical (“not more restrictive”) to the license that governs the original work. (See also copyleft.) Without share-alike, derivative works might be sublicensed with compatible but more restrictive license clauses, e.g. CC BY to CC BY-NC.)
	Non-commercial (NC)	Licensees may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and make derivative works and remixes based on it only for non-commercial purposes.
	No Derivative Works (ND)	Licensees may copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works and remixes based on it.

Seven regularly CC licenses