Comparison of Licenses

Further reading: BIOE 271 Lecture 17: Open Sourcing, Licenses, and Teams ↗

About the columns

Green / orange / red columns are quality judgements (good → bad). Blue / purple columns are just different types — neither is better.

  • Readability — is the license written in plain language a non-lawyer can understand? Some newer licenses are intentionally written this way, though they're not yet widely adopted.
  • Patent Grant — does the license explicitly give you the right to make, use, or sell the work without fear of a patent lawsuit from the licensor?
  • Modification Notices — must you list every change you make to the work? This adds admin overhead but protects the original author's reputation if your changes cause problems.
  • Reciprocality — if you build on the work, do you have to share your changes? (Permissive = no. Reciprocal = yes, under these terms.)
    • Trigger — what action requires you to share
    • Reach — how much of your work you must share
    • Licensing — what license your shared work must use
    • Distribution — how you must make it available
  • Cure Provision — if you accidentally break the license terms, do you get a chance to fix it before losing your rights? Without this, a mistake immediately terminates your license.
Type
All Software Hardware Media
Reciprocality
All Permissive Weakly Reciprocal Strongly Reciprocal
Quality columns: Positive Concerning Seriously concerning
Click row to expand reciprocality details · checkboxes to compare
0 selected max 5
Quality columns Type column Quality
License Type Reciprocality Readability Patent Grant Popularity Mod. Notices Cure Provision Compare

List of License Combinations

Common pairings of hardware + software + media licenses that work well together.

Type
All Strongly Reciprocal Weakly Reciprocal Permissive Mixed
Type columns: Strongly Reciprocal Weakly Reciprocal Permissive Mixed / Hardware Only
Type columns Quality columns
Combination Combination Type Mod. Notices Cure Provision SW Readability SW Flexibility SW Popularity HW/SW Consistency