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How to choose a license for your own work

This page is maintained by the Free Software Foundation's Licensing and Compliance Lab. You can
support our efforts by making a donation to the FSF. Have a question not answered here? Check out some
of our other licensing resources or contact the Compliance Lab at licensing@fsf.org.

To see whether a given license is free or not, see our license list page and the
definition of free software.

Introduction
People often ask us what license we recommend they use for their project. We've written about
this publicly before, but the information has been scattered around between different essays, FAQ
entries, and license commentaries. This article collects all that information into a single source, to
make it easier for people to follow and refer back to.
These recommendations are for works designed to do practical jobs. Those include software,
documentation, and some other things. Works of art, and works that state a point of view, are
different issues; the GNU Project has no general stand about how they should be released, except
that they should all be usable without nonfree software (in particular, without DRM). However,
you might want to follow these recommendations for art works that go with a particular program.
The recommendations apply to licensing a work that you createwhether that's a modification of
an existing work, or a new original work. They do not address the issue of combining existing
material under different licenses. If you're looking for help with that, please check our GPL FAQ.
After you see what we recommend here, if you'd like advice, you can write to
<licensing@gnu.org>. Note that it will probably take a few weeks for the licensing team to get
back to you; if you get no response in a month, please write again.

Contributing to an existing project

When you contribute to an existing project, you should usually release your modified versions
under the same license as the original work. It's good to cooperate with the project's maintainers,
and using a different license for your modifications often makes that cooperation very difficult.
You should only do that when there is a strong reason to justify it.
One case where using a different license can be justified is when you make major changes to a
work under a non-copyleft license. If the version you've created is considerably more useful than
the original, then it's worth copylefting your work, for all the same reasons we normally
recommend copyleft. If you are in this situation, please follow the recommendations below for
licensing a new project.

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If you choose to release your contributions under a different license for whatever reason, you
must make sure that the original license allows use of the material under your chosen license. For
honesty's sake, show explicitly which parts of the work are under which license.

Software
We recommend different licenses for different projects, depending mostly on the software's
purpose. In general, we recommend using the strongest copyleft license that doesn't interfere with
that purpose. Our essay What is Copyleft? explains the concept of copyleft in more detail, and
why it is generally the best licensing strategy.
For most programs, we recommend that you use the most recent version of the GNU General
Public License (GPL) for your project. Its strong copyleft is appropriate for all kinds of software,
and includes numerous protections for users' freedom.
Now for the exceptions.
Small programs
It is not worth the trouble to use copyleft for most small programs. We use 300 lines as our
benchmark: when a software package's source code is shorter than that, the benefits provided by
copyleft are usually too small to justify the inconvenience of making sure a copy of the license
always accompanies the software.
For those programs, we recommend the Apache License 2.0. This is a pushover (non-copyleft)
software license that has terms to prevent contributors and distributors from suing for patent
infringement. This doesn't make the software immune to threats from patents (a software license
can't do that), but it does prevent patent holders from setting up a bait and switch where they
release the software under free terms then require recipients to agree to nonfree terms in a patent
license.
Among the lax pushover licenses, Apache 2.0 is best; so if you are going to use a lax pushover
license, whatever the reason, we recommend using that one.
Libraries
For libraries, we distinguish three kind of cases.
Some libraries implement free standards that are competing against restricted standards, such as
Ogg Vorbis (which competes against MP3 audio) and WebM (which competes against MPEG-4
video). For these projects, widespread use of the code is vital for advancing the cause of free
software, and does more good than a copyleft on the project's code would do.
In these special situations, we recommend the Apache License 2.0.
For all other libraries, we recommend some kind of copyleft. If developers are already using an
established alternative library released under a nonfree license or a lax pushover license, then we
recommend using the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
Unlike the first case, where the library implements an ethically superior standard, here adoption
for its own sake will not accomplish any special objective goal, so there's no reason to avoid
copyleft entirely. However, if you require developers who use your library to release their whole

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programs under copyleft, they'll simply use one of the alternatives available, and that won't
advance our cause either. The Lesser GPL was designed to fill the middle ground between these
cases, allowing proprietary software developers to use the covered library, but providing a weak
copyleft that gives users freedom regarding the library code itself.
For libraries that provide specialized facilities, and which do not face entrenched noncopylefted or
nonfree competition, we recommend using the plain GNU GPL. For the reasons why, read Why
you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library.
Server Software
If it is likely that others will make improved versions of your program to run on servers and not
distribute their versions to anyone else, and you're concerned that this will put your released
version at a disadvantage, we recommend the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). The
AGPL's terms are almost identical to the GPL's; the sole substantive difference is that it has an
extra condition to ensure that people who use the software over a network will be able to get the
source code for it.
The AGPL's requirement doesn't address the problems that can arise for users when they entrust
their computing or their data to someone else's server. For instance, it won't stop Service as a
Software Substitute (SaaSS) from denying users' freedombut most servers don't do SaaSS. For
more about these issues, read Why the Affero GPL.

Documentation
We recommend the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) for tutorials, reference manuals
and other large works of documentation. It's a strong copyleft license for educational works,
initially written for software manuals, and includes terms which specifically address common
issues that arise when those works are distributed or modified.
For short, secondary documentation works, such as a reference card, it is better to use the GNU
all-permissive license, since a copy of the GFDL could hardly fit in a reference card. Don't use
CC-BY, since it is incompatible with the GFDL.
For man pages, we recommend the GFDL if the page is long, and the GNU all-permissive license
if it is short.
Some documentation includes software source code. For instance, a manual for a programming
language might include examples for readers to follow. You should both include these in the
manual under the FDL's terms, and release them under another license that's appropriate for
software. Doing so helps make it easy to use the code in other projects. We recommend that you
dedicate small pieces of code to the public domain using CC0, and distribute larger pieces under
the same license that the associated software project uses.

Other data for programs

This section discusses all other works for practical use that you might include with software. To
give you some examples, this includes icons and other functional or useful graphics, fonts, and
geographic data. You can also follow them for art, though we wouldn't criticize if you don't.
If you are creating these works specifically for use with a software project, we generally
recommend that you release your work under the same license as the software. There is no
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problem in doing so with the licenses we have recommended: GPLv3, LGPLv3, AGPLv3, and
GPLv2 can all be applied to any kind of worknot just softwarethat is copyrightable and has a
clear preferred form for modification. Using the same license as the software will help make
compliance easier for distributors, and avoids any doubt about potential compatibility issues.
Using a different free license may be appropriate if it provides some specific practical benefit, like
better cooperation with other free projects.
If your work is not being created for use with a particular software project, or if it wouldn't be
appropriate to use the same license as the project, then we only recommend that you choose a
copyleft license that's appropriate for your work. We have some of these listed on our license list.
If no license seems especially appropriate, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license
is a copyleft that can be used for many different kinds of works.
Copyright 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
License.

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