Open Licenses

Definition: Open licenses are provided with open data and open software (e.g., analysis code) to define how others can (re)use the licensed material. In setting out the permissions and restrictions, open licenses often permit the unrestricted access, reuse and retribution of an author’s original work. Datasets are typically licensed under a type of open licence known as a Creative Commons license (e.g., MIT, Apache, and GPL). These can differ in relatively subtle ways with GPL licenses (and their variants) being Copyleft licenses that require that any derivative work is licensed under the same terms as the original.

Related terms: Copyleft, Copyright, Creative Commons (CC) License, Licence, Open Data, Open Source

Reference: https://opensource.org/licenses

Drafted and Reviewed by: Andrew J. Stewart, Elizabeth Collins, Sam Parsons, Graham Reid, Steven Verheyen

Note that we are currently working on an automated mechanism to link references cited above with their full-length version that can be found at https://forrt.org/glossary/references with all references used so far.