Licensing materials

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

• the GNU General Public License [GPL]
• the GNU Lesser General Public License [LGPL]
• the MIT License

Licenses for texts, media, and other content

Recommended: Public Domain (e.g., the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication [CC-PD])

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 (PD).

To release your work into the public domain, visit the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication Form, which will guide you through placing your work under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC-PD). It will ask you for your email, name, and title of work, send you a confirmation email to verify your contact information, then 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.

• Read the Commons Deed
• View the Legal Code

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.

• Read the Commons Deed
• View the Legal Code

Licenses for library materials

• the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license [CC-NC],