Open Licenses are a set of conditions applied to an original work that grant permission for anyone to make use of that work as long as they follow the conditions of the license. A work refers to an original creation, such as a video, song, document, or piece of software, that can be copyright protected. The copyright owner – usually the creator of the work, whether an individual, a group, or a company/organization – can choose to openly license their work if they want others to be able to use it freely, build on it, customize it or improve it. Open licenses therefore give permission to anyone to use the work at no cost, and generally allow anyone to modify the work with no or minimal restriction (such as acknowledging the original author’s work). There are several open licenses that follow these principles, among the most common are Creative Commons licenses for written works, music, visual and other artistic expressions; and GNU General Public License for software. Exact conditions of open licenses are available under the license descriptions.
Creative Commons – State of the Commons 2015 (CC-BY)
Learn More
Open Source Definition https://opensource.org/docs/osd
Open Source Software Licenses: https://opensource.org/licenses
Open Content http://www.opencontent.org/definition/
Creative Commons licenses https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
