Free and Open Source software licenses explained

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This video is distributed under the Creative Commons Share Alike license.


00:00 Intro
00:39 Sponsor: 100$ off your Linux or Gaming server
01:31 GNU General Public License (GPL)
04:43 MIT License
06:00 Apache License
07:44 BSD License
09:06 Creative Commons
11:47 Quick Recap
12:55 Sponsor: Get a laptop or desktop with Linux from Tuxedo
14:09 I'm just a poor boy...


Let's begin with the GNU General Public License. The original GPL was created by Richard Stallman in 1989. It's what we call a copyleft license: all modifications made have to be redistributed under the same terms.

The GPL generally gives you the right to download and use, modify, and redistribute the code using the license, without any restrictions.

A lot of projects use the GPL, like the Linux kernel, most GNU software, Wordpress, Notepad++, or Git. Also, any project under the GPL can be sold, by the original creator, or anyone else, whether they modified the code or not, but the person who bought that software has every right to redistribute the code for free themselves.

Another much used license is the MIT license, with about 31% of FOSS projects using it in 2021. It's been created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, and it's also a free software license, that grants you the rights to copy, modify, merge, or distribute the code.

It's a very permissive license, much more flexible than the GPL, as it doesn't restrict what you can do with the code you're using, there is no copyleft or copyright included, so you can include code licensed under the MIT license in your proprietary software, and not redistribute your changes

The MIT license is used in some form or another by a LOT of projects, like the X11 display server, .Net Core, Angular, React, Node.js or jQuery.


On to the Apache license, also used a lot, by 14% of FOSS projects in 2021.

The Apache license is some form of middle ground between the GPL and the MIT license. It grants you all the free software freedoms of downloading, using, modifying, distributing, and selling software using the license, whether it's for personal, internal or commercial use.

The Apache license isn't a copyleft license like the GPL, which means your modifications don't have to use the Apache License, BUT the original work must still be published under the Apache license, and every modification has to be labeled clearly.

The Apache license is used by Android, the Apache HTTP server, Kubernetes, or the Open 3D Engine.

Then we have the BSD License. It was created by the Berkeley Source Distribution project, known as BSD, originally in 1969. There are multiple variants, but most grant the same freedoms to download, use, modify, redistribute the software, as long as the copyright notice and license are included.

The BSD license doesn't force any modification to be distributed under the terms of the BSD license.

But licences don't only apply to code. You can also license your creative work, like a book, a video, a drawing, any form of photo, or art, basically anything you create can be covered by a license. And one of the most well known and used is the Creative Commons.

There are 6 types of that license:

First, you have the basic "Attribution".
Then you have the Share Alike license, the Non derivative license, the Non Commercial license, the Non commercial Share Alike, and the, share alike, non derivative license.