Licenses

When creating a new project, LibrePCB allows to specify a license for it. This chapter gives an overview about the available licenses to help you deciding which makes most sense for your project.

First of all, choosing a license is not mandatory. Especially if you don’t intend to make the project public, it’s totally fine to skip the license selection. However, for projects made public it’s highly recommended to specify a license to let other people know what they are allowed or not allowed to do with your project. Theoretically you could write your own license text, but it’s recommended to choose one of the already existing, well-known licenses.

Please always read the full, original license text instead of relying on the information on this page. First, this page presents licenses in a very simplified form without all their details. Second, this documentation is not approved by a lawyer so it may not be correct. We’re not responsible for any implications caused by incomplete or wrong information on this page.

Available Licenses

The following licenses are provided by LibrePCB (depending on the installed version):

License Permissions Conditions Limitations

CC0-1.0
Summary

✅ Distribution
✅ Modification
✅ Commercial use

❌ No liability
❌ No warranty

CC-BY-4.0
Summary

✅ Distribution
✅ Modification
✅ Commercial use

⚠ License and Copyright Notice
⚠ State Changes

❌ No liability
❌ No warranty

CC-BY-SA-4.0
Summary

✅ Distribution
✅ Modification
✅ Commercial use

⚠ License and Copyright Notice
⚠ State Changes
⚠ Same License

❌ No liability
❌ No warranty

CC-BY-NC-4.0

✅ Distribution
✅ Modification

⚠ License and Copyright Notice
⚠ State Changes

❌ No liability
❌ No warranty
❌ Non-commercial only

CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0

✅ Distribution
✅ Modification

⚠ License and Copyright Notice
⚠ State Changes
⚠ Same License

❌ No liability
❌ No warranty
❌ Non-commercial only

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

✅ Distribution
✅ (Modification)

⚠ License and Copyright Notice
⚠ State Changes

❌ No liability
❌ No warranty
❌ No derivatives
❌ Non-commercial only

CC-BY-ND-4.0

✅ Distribution
✅ (Modification)
✅ Commercial use

⚠ License and Copyright Notice
⚠ State Changes

❌ No liability
❌ No warranty
❌ No derivatives

TAPR-OHL-1.0

✅ Distribution
✅ Modification
✅ Commercial use

⚠ License and Copyright Notice
⚠ State Changes
⚠ Same License
⚠ Notify upstream developers

❌ No liability
❌ No warranty

CERN-OHL-P-2.0
Summary
FAQ

✅ Distribution
✅ Modification
✅ Commercial use

⚠ License and Copyright Notice
⚠ State Changes

❌ No liability
❌ No warranty

CERN-OHL-W-2.0
Summary
FAQ

✅ Distribution
✅ Modification
✅ Commercial use

⚠ License and Copyright Notice
⚠ State Changes
⚠ Same License (relaxed)
⚠ Disclose source

❌ No liability
❌ No warranty

CERN-OHL-S-2.0
Summary
FAQ

✅ Distribution
✅ Modification
✅ Commercial use

⚠ License and Copyright Notice
⚠ State Changes
⚠ Same License (strong)
⚠ Disclose source

❌ No liability
❌ No warranty
License and Copyright Notice

A copy of the license and copyright notice must be included with the licensed material.

State Changes

Modifications made to the licensed material must be documented.

Same License

If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

Other Licenses

If you like to use a license not available in LibrePCB, or if you’re not sure yet and want to decide later, just skip the license selection when creating the project. Then add it manually afterwards as follows:

  1. Close the project in LibrePCB.

  2. In the root directory of the project, add a file named LICENSE.txt containing the license terms.

  3. Open README.md in a text editor and replace this line:

    No license set.

    by this one:

    See [LICENSE.txt](LICENSE.txt).

Or if you want to switch to a different license after you created a new project, just replace the file LICENSE.txt manually. LibrePCB itself does not provide a tool to change the license of an existing project.

Additional Actions

Note that some licenses may require to perform additional actions to correctly apply those licenses to a project. This applies mainly to the OHL licenses, but to be sure please check the license texts.

Please help us documenting the additional actions on GitHub!

Recommendation

Of course choosing a license is a personal decision and any recommendation from our side will be subjective. But generally, if you simply don’t care what people will do with your project, or you want to give them maximum freedom (without any liability or warranty from your side), we think CC0-1.0 is a great choice as this will allow everyone to use your project for any purpose. If you want to be quite restrictive and don’t want your project to be used for closed-source products, CERN-OHL-S-2.0 shouldn’t be a bad choice.

License of Libraries

Not only projects, but also libraries can be released under a certain license. However, we think public libraries should be released exclusively under the CC0-1.0 license. Any other license would make it too complicated for other people to create projects using these libraries, fulfilling all license terms of any used library.

Thus when creating a new library, CC0-1.0 is the only available option and all official libraries are published under this license so you can do with these libraries whatever you want, whether for commercial or non-commercial use.