This was going to be a collection of Creative Commons licenses converted to Markdown, because, amazingly, the CC licenses are only provided in HTML. But actually, most licenses aren't in Markdown, even though they should be. Licenses are just text, Markdown is cool, and GitHub makes Markdown easy to read.
So this repository aims to provide a bunch of licenses converted to Markdown. Pull-requests are very welcome.
Also, more public Git repositories should include a license file, because it's the difference between "all rights reserved" and "some rights reserved.
To help people choose a license, this readme will include text from GitHub's choosealicense.com as each license is converted. The descriptions for the Creative Commons licenses are from the Creative Commons website.
This document is not legal advice. The author is not a lawyer. The author can't provide legal advice. Contacting the author does not create an attorney-client relationship. The author of this repository may have made mistakes when copying the licenses contained herein. You accept full responsibility for your decision to use any of these documents for any purpose.
All documents in this repository are provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringment. In no event shall the authors be liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with these documents.
As well as the above conditions (which have precedence over other terms), I provide this document under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. The license files in this repository, however, are licensed under their own terms. Contact their respective authors for more information.
The GNU General Public License (GPL) is a copyleft license that requires anyone who distributes your code or a derivative work to make the source available under the same terms. (markdown, original)
The MIT License is a permissive license that is short and to the point. It lets people do anything they want with your code as long as they provide attribution back to you and don't hold you liable. (markdown)
The Unlicense dedicates your software to the public domain. Anyone would be able to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means. You won't be held liable. (markdown, original)
The Creative Commons licenses are great for creative works that aren't software.
The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. (markdown, original)
You're under no obligation to choose a license and it's your right not to include one with your code or project. But please note that opting out of open source licenses doesn't mean you’re opting out of copyright law.
You'll have to check with your own legal counsel regarding your particular project, but generally speaking, the absence of a license means that default copyright laws apply. This means that you retain all rights to your source code and that nobody else may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work. This might not be what you intend.
Even in the absence of a license file, if you publish your source code in a public repository on GitHub, you have accepted the Terms of Service which do allow other GitHub users some rights. Specifically, you allow others to view and fork your repository.
If you want to share your work with others, please consider choosing an open source license.