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:
“The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)
“Surely the fates are forever kind, though Nature’s laws are more immutable than any despot’s, yet to man’s daily life they rarely seem rigid, but permit him to relax with license in summer weather. He is not harshly reminded of the things he may not do.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)