Free license

A free license or open license is a license agreement which contains conditions permitted to the user from the holder on a specific list of uses for his work, which gives him four major freedoms.

Without a special license, these uses are prohibited by the laws of copyright.

Most free licenses are worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and perpetual (see Copyright durations).

Free licenses are often the basis of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding projects.

The invention of the term "free license" and the focus on the rights of users were connected to the sharing traditions of the hacker culture of the 1970s public domain software ecosystem, the social and political free software movement (since 1980) and the Open source movement (since the 1990s).

These rights were codified by different groups and organizations for different domains in Free Software Definition, Open Source Definition, Debian Free Software Guidelines, Definition of Free Cultural Works and the Open definition. These definitions were then transformed into licenses, utilizing the copyright as legal mechanism. Since then, ideas of free/open licenses spread into different spheres of society.

Open source, free culture (unified as Free and open source movement), anticopyright, projects, Public Domain advocacy groups and pirate parties are connected with free and open licenses.

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