Keep It Free

With the increasing popularity of free software, the idea has spread to other areas. The standard FOSS licenses don't always apply directly to documents, images, audio, video, fonts, or hardware. As a result, specialized licenses have emerged. This article will introduce you to some free licenses for handling documents, images, audio and video, fonts, and hardware.

Non-Software Licenses

Table 1 shows a summary of various free non-software licenses. (The Design Science License is no longer recommended and is only included for completeness.) In Table 1, where only the Creative Commons (CC [1]) license is cited, or where a standardized license specification ends with an asterisk in the column labeled SPDX, there are several variants and the licensor has to make a further, more precise selection. SPDX is an open standard supported by the Linux Foundation that provides a common means for communicating Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) information. The SPDX project maintains a list of "commonly found licenses and exceptions used in free and open or collaborative software, data, hardware, or documentation." [2]

Linux users tend to associate the Creative Commons licenses with software, but the Creative Commons collection is versatile enough to work with images, written documents, and audio and video files. The large collection of Creative Commons licenses fall into a series of license types (see Table 2 – with descriptions by Creative Commons [3]). As you can see, each type is defined by a combination of two-letter codes defining the license attributes:

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