== Licensing Resources ==

== GPL ==

Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation) describes "[http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/ copyleft]" as the opposite of copyright.  '''Copyright''' protects a ''creator's'' right to control copies and changes to a work, whereas '''copyleft''' (also known as the GPL license) protects a ''user's'' right to copy and change a work.

It is a license that allows free re-use and modification of creative work so long as the derivative work remains available on the same terms. 

(See [http://www.fsf.org/ Free Software Foundation] and the [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/ CopyLeft] page on the [http://www.gnu.org/ GNU.org] site)

== Creative Commons Licensing ==

These licenses all grant certain [http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/fullrights baseline rights], such as the right to   distribute the copyrighted work on file sharing networks. 

The rest of the license depends on the version, and is comprised of a selection of four conditions:

    * Attribution (by): Permit others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and derivative works based upon it only if they give you credit.

    * Noncommercial or !NonCommercial (nc): Permit others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and derivative works based upon it only for noncommercial purposes.

    * No Derivative Works or !NoDerivs (nd): Permit others to copy, distribute, display and perform only verbatim copies of the work, not derivative works based upon it.

    * !ShareAlike (sa): Permit others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work. (See also copyleft.)


(See this [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_License Wikipedia entry on Creative Commons] and the [http://creativecommons.org/ Creative Commons] site)

== Links ==
  * [http://www.opensourcelaw.biz/ Open Source Law]

== Institutions that protect Open Source Software ==
  * [http://www.tsc.org/ The Software Conservancy] is a nonprofit organization incorporated under the laws of the State of California. Its primary role is to serve as an independent, neutral organization to hold copyright to open source or free software source code and to fulfill related functions with respect to public software development projects creating such code.