You may feel that everything you download contains legalese. You can't do this, you can't do that, and you can't distribute such and such. Few people pay attention to these license agreements and might break them without ever knowing it. This article seeks to shed light on the various open source licenses available.
ContentsLicensing ?SIL OpenCreative CommonsMozilla Public LicenseApache Software LicenseFinding Your LicenseConclusionTechnically speaking, almost everything you download is licensed to you. You don't "own" it in the conventional sense. Even software you've paid for usually tends to be licensed, hence the term "license key".
However, your modified version of the font must also be released under the SIL Open License. This means that you cannot attempt to charge money for a change to an existing policy. This practice of inheriting licensing restrictions from the original work is known as "copylefting".
Depending on the particular font, some are licensed in a way that prevents you from publishing it under the same name. If someone created a font called "Serif", you can't call yours "Serif" either.
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization responsible for a family of digital licensing agreements. Often abbreviated as "CC", these licenses can be used on just about anything, although the organization does not recommend their use on software releases.
An unrestricted CC license means you can do whatever you want with the content as it waives most legal rights, while a CC-BY license means that you must credit the original creator of the content when you use it. CC-SA means you must follow copyleft policies; the license cannot be changed with the content.
BY-NC (Non-commercial) means the content cannot be used commercially, such as in a marketing campaign. PAR-ND (No Derivatives) means you cannot derive anything else from the content.
BY-NC-SA means you can modify the original, but you must release your version under the same BY-NC-SA license, you must credit the original author, and it cannot be used for commercial purposes. BY-ND-SA is the strictest of the CC licenses available, preventing any creation of derivative works and requiring that all content be accredited to its original author.
MPL, as it is called, is Mozilla's answer to software licensing. Like many other open source licenses, it is based on "copyleft", although this particular license is written to try to make it as easy as possible for developers to extend projects released under other licenses.
Although this is a Mozilla license, it is managed by the Mozilla project as opposed to the Firefox development team. Mozilla is a bigger group than many realize - not surprising when they are able to create an open source license, after all.
The MPL grants individuals and businesses the right to use software free of charge; any posted changes must reference the original code from which your work is derived.
ASL, or Apache Software License, is another option for software releases. Individuals and businesses may use ASL-licensed software freely; it may also be modified and redistributed under the terms of the license.
The Apache license has been around since early 2004 and has had a large number of adopters. All versions of Apache are under their own license, and other projects have also adopted it.
Interestingly, a modified version of ASL software does not require copyleft. It is entirely possible to modify a program and release it under another license, such as the Mozilla Public License, if you wish. The largest release under the Apache software license is probably Android, Google's mobile OS.
Depending on what you downloaded, the license may be part of the End User License Agreement (or EULA for short), or it may be found in the same archive as the file you wanted. In any case, it should now be possible to read them and get a general idea of their meaning.
As you can see, the production and distribution of online content is much more invested than you would have imagined. Everything, down to the rights of the user, must be considered closely.
If you're looking for a license for your own project and the ones we've covered don't fully satisfy you, you can check out this long list of open source licenses.
Image credit:Paul Downey
