Licenses

This page divides the licenses that have been reviewed by the Launchpad staff into open and proprietary groups. Licenses that comply with Legal#Project_eligibility are considered to be open, and the projects that use them are free to use Launchpad. Licenses that do not comply are considered to be proprietary. Projects with proprietary licenses can seek approval from Canonical or change to an open license.

Open

OSI-approved / FSF-approved
Licenses already approved as free-software / open-source licenses by the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative are automatically open enough for Launchpad. Any license on one list is usually on the other. If a project wants to use a license approved by one organization but not the other, we'll consider it on a case-by-case basis (but it's incredibly rare that that would come up).

Boost
http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt

CeCILL, CeCILL-B, and CeCILL-C
http://www.cecill.info/index.en.html
http://www.cecill.info/licences/Licence_CeCILL-B_V1-en.html
http://www.cecill.info/licences/Licence_CeCILL-C_V1-en.html

CPAL -- Common Public Attribution License
https://www.socialtext.net/open/index.cgi?cpal_osd_compliance

Creative Commons Attribution
http://creativecommons.org/

Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike
http://creativecommons.org/

NOSA -- NASA Open Source Agreement
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/nasa1.3.php

QPL -- The Q Public License Version 1.0
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/qtpl.php

W3C - W3C (R) Software License
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231

Unicode, Inc. License
http://unicode.org/copyright.html#Exhibit1

zlib/libpng License
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/zlib-license.php

Proprietary

Creative Commons Noncommercial licenses (by-nc, by-nc-nd, by-nc-sa)
http://creativecommons.org/
The noncommercial restrictions discriminate against a field of use (commercial edeavors).

Creative Commons No-Derivatives licenses (by-nd, by-nc-nd)
http://creativecommons.org/
The no-derivatives restrictions mean that users are not free to release modified versions.