Talk:Free license

Revising this article
I'm thinking about doing some work on this article - it's not my area of expertise but it seems to need some help. Others have thoughts? - Sara FB (talk) 22:01, 24 April 2013 (UTC)
 * It's not clear to me what justifies this being a separate article from, say Free software license or Open-source license. If we do want to improve the quality, I would say the best place to start is by reviewing those articles, and articulating what makes this one distinct from those. Once that is clear, I think the rest of the article will fall out clearly from there. The obvious thing is to cover non-software licensing, of course, but there is a lot of overlapping history - not sure how to address that. - LuisVilla (talk) 00:04, 15 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Luis, I think you've captured the main issue well. "free license" should be treated as the umbrella term that captures "free content license" and "free software license". Some nice general language might go a long way toward creating clarifying what this article does and doesn't need to be. I look forward to working on this with you and User:Snarfa and hopefully some of our students! -Pete (talk) 00:52, 15 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Some other relevant articles that would be good to survey and reconcile would include Free content and Open content. (By the way, is there a free/open licensing/materials project that works on this stuff? Or just page-by-page?) -LuisVilla (talk) 02:05, 15 June 2013 (UTC)


 * On the page it might be worth mentioning that a "Free license" is also known as a "Libre licence". An article "Libre" was deleted earlier this month. A new draft is in preparation which includes a section on Libre licences with content which could be merged here or elsewhere one way or another. --K (talk) 10:57, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Google voice
Not that we really should take editorial direction from what other people do with our work, I noticed that when you ask Google Voice "what are free licenses" or "what is a free license", it starts reading out the article at "Most free licenses are...".This makes what is being read out very criptic. Maybe whe should try to adjust the text so that people rely on this service get a better result? People with accessibility issues might not manage to get anything but this out of the article. 1Veertje (talk) 14:19, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

BSD license
I think BSD license allows open source software to be redistributed as closed source which should not happen by 4 freedom. Are you sure that BSD license is a free license ? it's a free-software license but is it also free license ?85.185.57.194 (talk) 13:24, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Rename the page to Open license

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: Not moved. (non-admin closure) Natg 19 (talk) 01:20, 14 April 2022 (UTC)

Free license → Open license – Most used open license Creative Commons prefer the term 'open license'. The term is more neutral and correct. Even in the text, the term open has been quite dominant. In the past, both were used very crosswise, but I unified it and we agreed that. Why not rename the article? :) --Avoinlähde (talk) 13:34, 21 March 2022 (UTC) — Relisting. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 20:13, 28 March 2022 (UTC) — Relisting. signed,  511KeV    (talk) 07:02, 5 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Oppose. Although it is getting closer, Free license is still the more common name. See [google ngrams]. - MrOllie (talk) 17:19, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Did you even look at the source you provided? Namely, according to your source, the open license is more common term (‪open license 0.0000000489%, ‬‪free license 0.0000000482%) --Avoinlähde (talk) 20:14, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Yes, in 2019. Fortunately, books don't cease to exist after a year, and the earlier datapoints on the graph remain relevant. MrOllie (talk) 20:24, 21 March 2022 (UTC)
 * When you look at the curve, you see that direction of the curve has been towards together for a long time. In 2019 (latest data point), the curve went together and open license is the most used term. When you give this as a source it would be nice to be content with its latest information. Moreover, when the difference is so small, I do not think such statistics have any weight. We do not know the context, etc. I prefer individual reliable sources and what that reliable sources say. I think Creative Commons is one when it comes to open/free licenses. --Avoinlähde (talk) 20:58, 21 March 2022 (UTC)

Would a decision be made on this? It seems that most are not interested or at least not opposed. I would think, both go to the majority of Wikipedists. I add one more source: https://opendefinition.org --Avoinlähde (talk) 17:38, 5 April 2022 (UTC)


 * A no consensus result would mean that the page would remain at this title. There's no deadline, might as well wait for more input. - MrOllie (talk) 17:44, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Did I say that? I trying to get other users to share their opinions in order to reach a consensus. -- Avoinlähde (talk) 18:06, 5 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Leaning oppose Given that the terms are largely interchangeable, I think we need something more compelling than the proponent's contention that the new term is "more correct" to change things. 'Open license' redirects to the article anyway, so unless there's a significant issue with redir traffic volume which would be reduced by changing, I'd say leave it as-is for now. --DoubleGrazing (talk) 09:45, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Oppose. When we turn smoothing off the ngrams we see that "Free licence" is consistently more common, including in 2019. BilledMammal (talk) 09:25, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Planning rewrite
Planning to rewrite and reorganize the article from sources. The above discussion from 2013 notes that the article should cover free and open-source software licenses and free content licenses. I agree with that, Rjjiii  (talk) 08:23, 8 July 2024 (UTC)


 * I've reorganized the article. The "Free software license" section is written according to sources. The "History" section is pre-existing content and the "Free content license" section is pulled from Free content. Those two likely need to be written to WP:RS, and improvements merged into Free content. Pings to editors who previously discussed updating this article, no replies needed but I thought I'd give a heads up since the discussion was a whole decade ago,  Rjjiii  (talk) 13:28, 11 July 2024 (UTC)