A few years ago, inspired by the Free Software movement and Ram Samudrala's Free Music ideas, I decided that I needed a license for my music that would ensure the freedom of my music in the same way that the GNU GPL ensures freedom for software.
I was not the only person with these ideas at the time. The OpenContent group had created the Open Content License for exactly this purpose, and was very close to using it for my own music. Unfortunately there were aspects of it which I disliked, and so I set about writing a modified license for my own purposes.
I did this somewhat reluctantly, partly because I don't have the legal knowledge to do this safely, but more because I was aware of the confusions that license proliferation was causing in the software world. I was rather hoping that natural selection would trim the number of such licenses down, in the way that the GPL and BSD licenses are pushing out other Free Software licenses, but there is little evidence that this has happened so far.
The purpose of this page, then, is to document these various licenses. I'm interested in licenses which attempt to apply Free Software and Open Source principles to non-software content, and would like to be told of any other licenses that should be included on this page.
This is Apple's license for the documentation in Darwin. It requires that derivative works state the nature of the modifications made. It is written with documentation in mind.
I wrote this license myself, as a modification of the Open Content License and the GPL. Essentially it removes the Open Content License's restrictions on charging for access. It requires that derivative works carry a notice stating the nature of modifications made. Unlike most of the licenses here, it does not contain a disclaimer of warranty.
This license contains some measures to preserve the original author's reputation.
The preamble focuses on audio content, though the wording of the license does not indicate that it is limited to audio content. Use of the "(O)" notation to indicate that work is released under this license seems to me to be somewhat suspect.
This license is limited to written content. It contains extensive measures to preserve the original author's reputation.
This license is written in French, so I don't know much about it.
This license is regarded as non-free by the FSF, presumably because of its restrictions on charging for access across a network. It requires that derivative works carry a notice stating the nature of the modifications made.
This license contains some measures to preserve the original author's reputation, and some to prevent commercial distribution of the work.
The Open Text License was designed for use with textbooks and teaching material. It takes the form of an amendment to the GNU General Public License which defines some of the terms used in the GPL in a way that makes sense for text instead of software. It is therefore very close to the GPL in spirit.
This is the license of the OpenText Project.
This license is extremely long and detailed and contains extensive measures to preserve the original author's reputation.