Free license is such license agreement, which contain conditions permit to the user from the holder on a specific list of uses for his work, which gives him four major freedom (or based on them).
Without a special license these uses are prohibited by the laws of copyright.
Most of free licenses is worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and perpetual.
Free licenses often are basis of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding projects.
The invention of the term "free license" and focusing on the rights of users were connected to the traditions of the hacker culture of the 1970s and the social and political free software movement (since 1980). Since then times ideas of free licenses spreaded into different spheres of society. Open source, free culture, anticopyright, Wikimedia movements, pirate parties are connected with free licenses.
Read more about Free License: Problems
Famous quotes containing the words free and/or license:
“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1948)
“I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness.... It is the inattentive reader
who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)