The Approved Licenses

For your convenience, we have collected here copies of the licenses approved by OSI. If you distribute your software under one of these licenses, you are permitted to say that your software is "OSI Certified Open Source Software."

The "classic" licenses, GPL, LGPL, BSD, and MIT, were the most commonly used for open-source software before the Mozilla release in early 1998. The Mozilla Public License has since become widely used. Many other licenses have been submitted for review and approval by OSI. As you can see, the list of approved licenses is growing.

If you can, use one of the already-approved licenses for distributing your software. But be sure that you read and understand the license terms completely. We encourage you to select a license that is consistent with your business model. And consult with your own attorney, because OSI does not provide legal advice.

License Versions and Translations

The official versions of these licenses are the ones published on the OSI website. Translations of these licenses into other languages may be available but those translations are not official or legally binding.

Email concerning licensing

OSI has also established a mailing list to review licenses submitted to license-approval at opensource.org. To subscribe, send mail to license-discuss-subscribe at opensource.org. Unsubscribes go to license-discuss-unsubscribe at opensource.org. The usual -request address works as well. This list is archived here.

There is also an "announcement list". To receive notice of OSI actions, e.g. approving licenses, position papers, etc. send an email to announcements-subscribe at opensource.org. To subscribe a group address send a msg like so: announcements-subscribe-news=news.com at opensource.org Subscribing to the announcements list is highly recommended.