Licensing materials

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OLPC is distributing laptops for children to communities throughout the developing world, with trial projects underway in Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Nigeria, and Thailand. The laptops are intended to be tools for exploration and creation; as such, all materials shipped on the laptops will be free for children to use, change, and share. Software and content collections on the laptops are all freely licensed under one of the following licenses:

Licenses for software

GNU General Public License [GPL]

Abridged from the GNU website:

The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for software and other kinds of works. Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. The GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program-- to make sure it remains free software for all its users.

The CC-GNU GPL adds the Creative Commons' metadata and Commons Deed to the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License.

GNU Lesser General Public License [LGPL]

Using the ordinary GPL for your software makes it available only for free programs; using the LGPL makes it available for use in proprietary programs as well. Read Why you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library for an in-depth comparison between the GPL and the LGPL.

The CC-GNU LGPL adds the Creative Commons' metadata and Commons Deed to the Free Software Foundation's GNU Lesser General Public License.

MIT License

Licenses for texts, media, and other content

Recommended: Public Domain

Once placed in the public domain, your work may be freely used, changed, and shared by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.

Peter St-Andre has an excellent essay, "Who's Afraid of the Public Domain?" that outlines the reasons to release your work into the public domain.

The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication [CC-PD]

One way to release your work into the public domain is to visit the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication Form, which will guide you through the process of placing your work under the Creative Commons "Public Domain Dedication." The form will ask you for your email, name, and title of work, and send you a confirmation email to verify your contact information. Then, it will autogenerate the license text for you along with instructions for how to include it in your work.

Creative Commons Attribution license [CC-BY]

This license lets others use, change, and share your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you with original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered in terms of what others can do with your work.

Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license [CC-BY-SA]

This license lets others use, change, and share your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you with original creation and license new creations under identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

Creative Commons Non-commercial license [CC-NC]

This license lets others use, change, and share your work non-commercially, and although their new works must acknowledge you, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

GNU Free Documentation License [GFDL]

Similar to the GPL (see above), the GNU Free Documentation License is a form of copyleft intended for use on a manual, textbook or other document to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifications, either commercially or non-commercially.

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