About LicenseAtlas
LicenseAtlas is a software, data, AI model, and agent license explorer covering 2623 licenses and terms across five categories. It combines searchable license texts with OSI review history, board-vote records, popularity signals, and OSADL checklist-derived compliance metadata.
License & Metadata Sources
License texts and sidecar metadata are aggregated from the following public and authoritative sources:
- SPDX — Software Package Data Exchange license list
- OSI — Open Source Initiative approved licenses
- TLDRLegal — Software licenses explained in plain English
- choosealicense.com — GitHub's license selection guide
- GitHub — Repository counts, trends, and confirmed custom licenses from agent skills, MCP servers, and open-source tools
- HuggingFace Hub — AI model and dataset licenses, including custom and gated model agreements
- Open Data Commons — Data licenses and dedications
- FSF / GNU — Free Software Foundation libre evaluations and GNU license list
- Creative Commons — CC license official texts
- RAIL — Responsible AI licenses
- OpenAtom Foundation — Model and hardware licenses maintained by OpenAtom Foundation (bilingual CN/EN)
- ScanCode LicenseDB — 1,800+ custom license texts from ScanCode LicenseDB (CC-BY-4.0). Permissive, copyleft, proprietary-free, and source-available licenses.
- Blue Oak Council — Quality ratings for 225+ permissive licenses (Model/Gold/Silver/Bronze/Lead)
- OpenMDW — Permissive open-source license for machine-learning models and related artifacts, by Linux Foundation
- OSI Review Tracker — Compiled from OSI's public license API, license-review/license-discuss mailing-list archives, and OSI board meeting minutes
- OSADL — Open Source License Checklists with obligation/prohibition summaries, copyleft/source-disclosure/patent hints, and directional compatibility data
OSADL Checklist Data
LicenseAtlas uses 121 OSADL Open Source License Checklist records, currently matched to 120 LicenseAtlas licenses. The OSADL sidecar is refreshed through the Atlas update workflow and shown on license detail pages when a checklist can be matched. OSADL raw checklist material is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY-4.0); LicenseAtlas attributes OSADL as the source when displaying this data.
One OSADL record is not shown on a license detail page: GPL-2.0-only WITH Classpath-exception-2.0. It is an SPDX license expression rather than a standalone LicenseAtlas license page.
OSADL states that the checklist material is work in progress / draft state. The checklist-derived obligations, copyleft data, and compatibility signals are informational only, not legal advice. OSADL assembled the material with diligence and care, but does not warrant correctness, usefulness, merchantability, or fitness for a particular purpose; use of the information is at the user's sole responsibility, and individual legal questions should be directed to a lawyer.
(C) 2017 - 2024 Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) eG and contributors, info@osadl.org
OSI License Review Tracker
The review tracker covers 190 OSI license submissions, including 102 approved, 43 rejected, and 18 pending reviews, with discussion timelines and board-vote records where available. Original records come from OSI's public license API, OSI mailing-list archives, and OSI board meeting minutes; LicenseAtlas compiles, normalizes, and presents those public records. Submitted license texts are reproduced from public review/discussion records for research and review-tracking purposes; copyright remains with the original authors or license stewards.
Disclaimer
LicenseAtlas provides license texts, review records, checklist data, compatibility signals, popularity data, and summaries for research, search, and general reference only. It does not provide legal advice or compliance advice. Rights and obligations should be determined from the original license text and official sources; specific questions about use, distribution, modification, compliance, or disputes should be directed to a qualified legal professional.
LicenseAtlas makes reasonable efforts to cite public sources and preserve source links, but does not warrant the completeness, accuracy, timeliness, or fitness for a particular purpose of third-party data, extracted text, summaries, matches, or compatibility signals. Third-party license texts, public review records, OSADL checklist data, and platform metadata remain subject to their original copyrights, licenses, and source terms.
Popularity & Trends
Popularity scores and trend signals are generated from real-world usage data across three major platforms:
- HuggingFace Hub — 2.8M+ models and 927K+ datasets
- GitHub — Repository counts across 28 license types
- Kaggle — 714K+ datasets via Meta-Kaggle
License-card trend sparklines use HuggingFace monthly license-trends extracted from the models parquet; GitHub contributes repository counts and project-showcase stars, while Kaggle contributes dataset votes.
Roadmap
- License comparison tool
- License interpretation guides
