Free Licenses

Free licenses are used to grant rights to all people in a world where all marketable content is protected by intellectual property laws by default. This includes everything from media (literary works, music, images, craftworks), software and hardware designs. Granting rights to the public is not easy because without strongly written licenses, the author of the content can be held liable for any damage caused by anyone using her works.

I have listed some free licenses which can be used to give legal rights to the public to freely use the works.

Media

Public Domain

• CC0 1.0 Universal

Permissive

• Creative Commons Attribution

Conditionally Permissive

• Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial

Copyleft

• Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike
• Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike

Non Commercial

• Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial
• Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike
• Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives

Non Modifiable

• Creative Commons Attribution NoDerivatives
• Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives

Software

Legally Strong

Public Domain

• Zero Clause BSD License

Permissive

• MIT License
• ISC License
• BSD 3 Clause License

Copyleft

• GNU AGPLv3
• GNU GPLv3

Ethical

• Hippocratic License

Legally Weaker

Public Domain

• WTFPL
• The Unlicense

Hardware

• CERN OHL
• Solderpad License