Your License

About

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Most license chooser sites focus on open-source software and treat everything else as out of scope. That leaves whole categories — fair-code, Creative Commons, proprietary — with no good reference.

yourlicense.ca is the single place where all four categories sit next to each other, use the same filter vocabulary, and can be compared side-by-side.

How it works

Every license has a page with a short summary, its rules as a three-column checklist (permissions, conditions, limitations), the full licence text, and pointers to similar licenses. The rules use the same vocabulary that choosealicense.com uses where they overlap, extended to cover fair-code and Creative Commons cases that choosealicense does not.

All Rights Reserved

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“All Rights Reserved” is the default state under modern copyright law for any original work — software, writing, images. No one other than the copyright holder may copy, modify, distribute, or create derivative works without explicit permission.

Paradoxically, publishing code on GitHub without a licence makes it “all rights reserved” by default. Viewers can read it, but cannot legally use it. If your goal is for others to use your work, pick an open-source or Creative Commons licence instead.

Apache License 2.0

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Apache 2.0 is a permissive license similar in spirit to MIT but with two key additions: an explicit patent grant from contributors, and an explicit requirement to document significant changes. It does not grant trademark rights.

The patent grant makes Apache 2.0 preferable for projects with many contributors or corporate sponsors — it reduces the risk of patent lawsuits against downstream users. Apache 2.0 is not compatible with GPL-2.0, but is compatible with GPL-3.0 and later.

BSD 3-Clause License

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BSD 3-Clause is a short, permissive license that adds one constraint MIT does not: you cannot use the names of the original authors or contributors to endorse or promote products derived from the software without specific written permission.

In practice, the rules are nearly identical to MIT. Choose BSD-3-Clause if the no-endorsement clause is important to you or your project has historical BSD heritage.

How to apply

Add a LICENSE file with the full BSD 3-Clause text at the root of your project, filling in the copyright owner and year.

Business Source License 1.1

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The Business Source License (BUSL) is source-available today and converts to an open-source license (chosen by the licensor, typically Apache-2.0 or GPL) on a pre-declared “Change Date”, typically four years after release. Until that date, commercial use outside a declared “Additional Use Grant” is restricted.

It is popular with venture-backed infrastructure companies that want to ship source code without giving competitors a free path to offer the software as a managed service.

Copyleft

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Copyleft is a licensing requirement that derivative works of a licensed work must be distributed under the same (or a compatible) licence. The term is a play on “copyright”: rather than reserving rights, copyleft uses copyright law to compel downstream sharing.

Licenses fall on a spectrum:

None (permissive)

No share-back requirement. MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD, ISC. Derivative works can be relicensed as anything, including proprietary. The trade-off: a proprietary fork can absorb your work without giving anything back.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

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CC BY 4.0 is Creative Commons’ most permissive licence that still requires attribution. Anyone may share, remix, adapt, and build on the material for any purpose, including commercial, provided they give appropriate credit, link to the licence, and indicate if changes were made.

It is a good default for text, images, video, and datasets when you want the widest possible reuse but still want recognition. For pure databases in the EU, ODbL-1.0 addresses sui generis rights CC BY does not fully cover.

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0

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CC BY-SA 4.0 is the copyleft Creative Commons licence. Anyone may share, remix, adapt, and build on the material for any purpose, including commercial, provided they give appropriate credit and license their adaptations under the same licence or a CC-approved compatible licence.

It is the right choice for content that should stay in the commons even as it is remixed. Wikipedia uses CC BY-SA 4.0 in combination with the GNU Free Documentation License.

Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal

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CC0-1.0 is a public-domain dedication. The author waives, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, all copyright and related rights — and in jurisdictions where waiver is not possible, grants an equivalent unconditional licence.

CC0 does not grant patent or trademark rights. For software, the FSF considers CC0 free and GPL-compatible, but OSI has not formally approved it.

For content, media, and data, CC0 is the most permissive option. For software specifically, many projects prefer MIT or the Unlicense.

Disclaimer

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Everything on yourlicense.ca is informational only. It is not legal advice, and using it does not create a lawyer-client relationship with anyone.

What we do

We summarise common licenses using a consistent rule vocabulary.
We link to the authoritative full text for each licence.
We provide tools (filter, wizard, compare) that help you narrow options.

What we do not do

We do not interpret your specific situation.
We do not verify licence compatibility for your exact combination of code and dependencies.
We do not guarantee that our summaries are complete or current.

Jurisdictions

This site is authored in Canada. Licenses discussed originate in various jurisdictions. Enforceability and interpretation vary by country and by court. Some provisions that are enforceable in one jurisdiction are not in another.

Elastic License 2.0

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Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2) is a short source-available license with three simple restrictions: you cannot provide the software as a managed service, you cannot circumvent license keys, and you cannot remove or alter licensing or copyright notices.

Everything else — use, modification, distribution, private use, commercial use in your own products — is allowed. ELv2 is much shorter than BUSL and does not have a conversion date.

ELv2 is not OSI-approved.

Fair code and source-available licenses

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Fair code is an informal term for licenses that are:

source-available (the code can be read and often modified),
free to use in most scenarios, but
restricted in at least one dimension that makes them incompatible with the Open Source Definition.

The most common restrictions:

No hosting as a service — you cannot offer the software as a managed service that competes with the licensor. Examples: SSPL, Elastic License 2.0, Confluent Community License.
Non-commercial — you cannot use the software commercially without a separate agreement. Examples: PolyForm Noncommercial, Commons Clause derivatives.
Field of use — the software cannot be used in a named industry or for a named purpose. Examples: some Hippocratic-style licenses.
Time-delayed conversion — restricted now, becomes open source automatically after a specified period. Example: Business Source License (BUSL).

Why not just use an OSI licence?

Venture-backed infrastructure companies discovered a pattern: they build a piece of open-source software (MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis), a cloud provider forks it and offers it as a managed service, and the cloud provider out-competes the original authors on distribution because they already run the data plane.

Generic End-User License Agreement

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An End-User License Agreement (EULA) is a binding contract between a software vendor and an end user. Commercial software almost always ships with one. A generic template typically covers: licence grant (usually a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use), restrictions (no reverse engineering, no redistribution, no removing copyright notices), ownership, warranty disclaimer, limitation of liability, termination, and governing law.

The template published on this site is a starting point only. Jurisdictions differ on what is enforceable. Have a lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction review the EULA before you ship.

GNU General Public License v3.0

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GPL-3.0 is a strong copyleft license. Anyone who distributes the software, modified or not, must make the complete corresponding source available under GPL-3.0. It includes an explicit patent grant and patent-retaliation clause.

It also includes anti-tivoization provisions — you cannot distribute GPL-3.0 software on hardware that prevents users from installing modified versions.

Pick GPL-3.0 when you want to make sure derivative works stay open. Pick AGPL-3.0 if you also want to close the loophole where software offered as a network service is not considered “distributed”.

GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0

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LGPL-3.0 is a “library” variant of GPL-3.0. If you modify the LGPL-3.0 library itself, your modifications must be released under LGPL-3.0. If you just use the library — link to it, call its APIs — your own code can stay under any license, even proprietary.

LGPL-3.0 is a good fit for reusable libraries where you want modifications to the library itself to stay open, but you are fine with the library being called from closed-source code.

How to apply a licence

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Picking a licence is half the work. Actually attaching it so it is discoverable, enforceable, and scannable by compliance tooling is the other half.

For a software repository

Add a LICENSE file at the root of the repository containing the full text of the chosen licence. Use the canonical text from the licence’s official source, not a paraphrase.
Fill in the copyright line if the licence template has one (MIT, BSD, Apache all do). Use the current year and the correct author or organisation name.

ISC License

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ISC is a permissive license produced by the Internet Systems Consortium. It is functionally identical to the simplified BSD license and the MIT license — use, modify, distribute, include the copyright notice — but uses even fewer words.

It is npm’s default license for new packages, which is why you’ll see it on a lot of small JavaScript libraries.

How to apply

Add a LICENSE file with the full ISC text, filling in the copyright year and holder.

MIT License

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The MIT License is one of the shortest and most permissive open-source licenses. It lets anyone use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and sell copies of the software, provided they include the original copyright notice and license text.

It is a good default for libraries and frameworks you want adopted as widely as possible. If you care about protecting against patent claims from contributors, consider Apache-2.0 instead — the patent grant is the main difference.

Mozilla Public License 2.0

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MPL-2.0 applies copyleft at the file level: if you modify an MPL-2.0 file, that file stays under MPL-2.0, but new files can be under a different license. This makes it easier to combine MPL-2.0 code with proprietary code than GPL or LGPL.

It includes an explicit patent grant and retaliation clause. It is compatible with both GPL and Apache-style licenses, which makes MPL-2.0 a common choice for projects that want some copyleft protection without scaring off commercial users.

Server Side Public License v1.0

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SSPL is MongoDB’s response to the AGPL “loophole”: if you offer the software as a managed service, you must also release under SSPL the source code of every program you use to offer that service — provisioning, monitoring, orchestration, backup. In effect, it is strong copyleft extended to your service stack.

The OSI rejected SSPL as not meeting the Open Source Definition, specifically on Criterion 6 (no discrimination against fields of endeavour). It is therefore fair-code / source-available, not open source.

SPDX identifiers

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SPDX is the Software Package Data Exchange — an open standard for communicating software bill-of-materials information, including licenses. Its most visible piece is the SPDX License List: a registry of short, unique identifiers for each license.

Examples:

MIT
Apache-2.0
GPL-3.0-only (or GPL-3.0-or-later)
BSD-3-Clause
CC-BY-4.0

SPDX identifiers in source files

Add a one-line header to the top of every source file:

// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT

Tools including REUSE, licensee, and GitHub’s license detection understand these identifiers and will correctly attribute the file.