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:
“You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)