Licenses

Important

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This page divides the licenses that have been reviewed by the Launchpad staff into open and proprietary groups. Licenses that comply with Project eligibility are considered to be open, and the projects that use them are free to use Launchpad. Licenses that do not comply are considered to be proprietary. Projects with proprietary licenses can seek approval from Canonical or change to an open license.

Open

OSI-approved/FSF-approved

Licenses already approved as free-software / open-source licenses by the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative are automatically open enough for Launchpad. Any license on one list is usually on the other. If a project wants to use a license approved by one organization but not the other, we’ll consider it on a case-by-case basis (but it’s incredibly rare that that would come up).

• Boost

  • http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt

• CeCILL, CeCILL-B, and CeCILL-C

  • http://www.cecill.info/index.en.html

  • http://www.cecill.info/licences/Licence_CeCILL-B_V1-en.html

  • http://www.cecill.info/licences/Licence_CeCILL-C_V1-en.html

• CPAL – Common Public Attribution License

  • https://www.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?cpal_osd_compliance

• Creative Commons Attribution

  • http://creativecommons.org/

• Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike

  • http://creativecommons.org/

• NOSA – NASA Open Source Agreement

  • http://www.opensource.org/licenses/nasa1.3.php

• QPL – The Q Public License Version 1.0

  • http://www.opensource.org/licenses/qtpl.php

• W3C - W3C (R) Software License

  • http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231

• Unicode, Inc. License

  • http://unicode.org/copyright.html#Exhibit1

• zlib/libpng License

  • http://www.opensource.org/licenses/zlib-license.php

Proprietary

• Creative Commons Noncommercial licenses (by-nc, by-nc-nd, by-nc-sa)

  • http://creativecommons.org/

  • The noncommercial restrictions discriminate against a field of use (commercial edeavors).

• Creative Commons No-Derivatives licenses (by-nd, by-nc-nd)

  • http://creativecommons.org/

  • The no-derivatives restrictions mean that users are not free to release modified versions.