Plain License FAQ

Why do your licenses look different from the originals?

We recraft licenses to make them easier to understand. We strive to capture the intent of the original license, and want to make the legal meaning as clear as we can. We prioritize accuracy and clarity. We make changes to make the license as clear as possible.

Is anything else different about your licenses?

Yes. We make a few changes with all our licenses:

• Style. We make consistent style changes to our licenses for clarity and consistency. We use the following conventions:

  Our Words	Legal Words
  you	licensee, recipient
  we, authors	licensor, provider, owner, author, developer, contributor, company
  the work	licensed work, software, creation, covered work, library, materials

  If a license talks about “contributors” as well as ‘licensors’ (or similar), we use ‘contributors’ when we talk about the people who contribute to the work and “authors” to talk about the people who license the work. Authors and contributors are often the same people, but the license may treat them differently.

• Coverage. We try to generalize the license to cover all types of works, not just software, which is why we use “the work” instead of “the software” in our licenses. We know even if you’re using a license mostly for software, it will probably cover other types of works too, like documentation or graphics. We can’t cover every possible use, but we try to make our licenses flexible. Even when an original license uses “software,” you can use it for other types of works, like documentation or graphics. We make it clear that our licenses apply to all types of works, not just software, so you can use them for any type of creative work.

• Formatting. We use formatting to make the license easier to read. We use headings, lists, tables, bold, italics and other formatting to make the license clearer and easier to read. We also reorganize the license and may add a summary of the license terms at the beginning of the license to make it easier to understand.

• Interpretation Statement. We add an interpretation section to our licenses to clarify that the license is based on the original license and to tell anyone looking at it for legal reasons they can refer to the original license if they are unclear about the legal meaning of the plain language version. This makes the original license a kind of “fallback” for legal purposes.

• Compatibility Statement. For copyleft licenses, we clarify that our version of the license is compatible with the original license and you can use the original license with the work if you want. We can’t guarantee our license will work with the original license, but we try to make them as compatible as possible.

Can I use one of your licenses for my project?

Yes! Our licenses are in the public domain, * We use the Plain Unlicense for our licenses when we can. Unfortunately, we can't use the Plain Unlicense for all our licenses because some original licenses are licensed under terms that don't allow us to use the Plain Unlicense. In those cases, we use the most permissive license we can and make it clear the license is not in the public domain. so you can use them for any project. We want to make it easier for people to understand the licenses covering their work, so we’re happy to see our licenses used for real projects. You can change them however you like, and you don’t have to give us credit. If you appreciate Plain License and our message, then please tell people about us. Our licenses complement the original license. Every plain license includes an interpretation statement that makes it clear the plain language version is based on the original license. This statement makes the original license a legal “fallback” if you are unclear about the legal meaning of the plain language version.

While we believe plain language helps everyone * "Everyone" includes lawyers and judges, who are real people. We promise. better understand your intent, we can’t guarantee our licenses will work for your project or will hold up in court. We’re not lawyers, and we can’t provide legal advice. If you have questions about how to use our licenses, we recommend you talk to a lawyer. If you choose to use one of our licenses, you use it at your own risk.

We use the Plain Unlicense for most of our content, so we use our licenses. We hope you find our licenses useful for your project. We welcome feedback to help us improve them, and love legal feedback to help us improve our interpretations.

Is this another open source advocacy project?

No. We are a plain language project. We support open source licensing. Plain License itself is dedicated to the public domain, which is one of many ways to make a work open source. We do not advocate for any particular license or set of licenses. We believe there are good reasons to license your work in many different ways and we think everyone deserves clear, understandable licenses. We want to help people understand the licenses covering their work, and we want to help people reading them understand what they mean — that’s it.

What is plain language?

Plain language is a way of writing that makes information easy to understand. It’s not “dumbing down” or “simplifying.” Instead, plain writing makes your message clear, so everyone can understand what you’re saying. We believe that’s important for everyone. What is the point of writing something if your readers struggle to understand it?

Governments and people around the world are embracing plain language, and now we have an international plain language standard ➚ that sets out the principles of plain language.

The Center for Plain Language ➚ offers resources to help you write plainly. You can get started with their five-step guide ➚.

Many countries also have laws promoting plain language. In the United States, the Plain Writing Act of 2010 requires federal agencies to write “clear Government communication that the public can understand and use.” * Take a close look at any recent instructions from the IRS and you'll see how much clearer they are than they used to be. We think that's a good thing, and we want to help make licenses clearer too. We think that’s a good idea for everyone, not just the government. Plainlanguage.gov ➚ is a great resource for plain writing.

I understand legal writing, why should I care about plain language?

Plain language is for everyone. We have spent our lives reading and writing complex writing, and our schools often reward us for it. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to communicate. Plain language prioritizes understanding first, which is really the point of writing, isn’t it? That’s important for everyone, not just people who struggle with reading.

Take it from us, it’s hard to write clearly. Taking complex ideas and making them simple is not easy, and it takes work to consider how people might misunderstand you. But it’s worth it. When you write clearly, you make it easier for everyone to understand your message. That’s why we think plain language is important for everyone.

Aren’t there enough licenses already? Isn’t this just adding to the confusion?

There are a lot of licenses out there, and that can be confusing. We think that’s a problem, especially when the licenses are hard to understand. For example, the Free Software Foundation’s GPL 3 requires a very long faq ➚ just to explain how to use the license. * The GPL 3 is a great license, but it's very hard to understand. We applaud the FSF for their work providing clear answers to questions about the license. We think that's a great step in the right direction.

We think our licenses stand out because they’re clear and easy to read. We hope by making licenses easier to understand, we can help people make better decisions about how to license their work. We can’t fix the problem of too many licenses. We can only offer our licenses to complement and clarify the licenses people use. Maybe one day we’ll see a world where all licenses are written in plain language.

What’s the difference between the version numbers for ‘original version’ and ‘plain version’ in your licenses?

We version our licenses separately from the original licenses. We want to make it clear when we’ve made changes to the license, and communicate what we’ve changed. We version our licenses separately to make it clear. We provide the original license version to tell you what version ours is based on, for example, the Apache 2.0 license has an original version of 2.0. We version our licenses with a major, minor, and patch version number, for example, 1.0.0. You can see the version of the original license and the version of our license in the license text near the top of the license.

On every license page, we provide a link to the changelog for the license. The changelog tells you what we’ve changed in each version of the license. The link is in the tabs above the license text.

How does your versioning work?

We use something similar to semantic versioning ➚, but we don’t follow it exactly. Like our licenses, we adapted semantic versioning to make it easier to understand for license content. We version our licenses separately from the original licenses, and we use the following format: major`.`minor`.`patch.

• Major: We increment to version 1.0 when we are confident the license is accurate and clear, and accurately reflects the legal intent of the original license. We will only increment to other major versions if we find a significant error in the license that requires a major change.
• Minor: We increment minor versions when we make significant changes to the license, such as adding or removing terms, or changing the structure of the license. We also increment the minor version when we make substantial changes to the style or formatting of the license.
• Patch: We increment the patch version when we make minor changes to the license, such as fixing typos or formatting mistakes, changing a word to a simpler synonym, or other minor issues that don’t affect the structure or meaning of the license.

What will you do if a major license changes?

We will update our version of the license to match the new version of the original license. We will also update our interpretation of the license to reflect any changes in the original license. We will make it clear in the changelog what changes we made to the license and why we made them. If the new license has a new version number, we will update our license to match. Let’s say the Mozilla Foundation releases version 3.0 of the Mozilla Public License. We will release a Plain MPL version that reflects the changes. If both licenses are still used regularly, we will make it clear which version of the original license our plain language version is based on. For example, if we release a Plain MPL 3.0, we will make it clear it’s based on the Mozilla Public License 3.0 and not the Mozilla Public License 2.0.

What will you do if they change a major license to use plain language?

Celebrate! Our goal is to make licenses easier to understand, and if a major license changes to use plain language, we think that’s a great thing. We might update our version. If they do a really good job, we might just link to their version and say “look how great this is!” We will always make it clear which version of the original license our plain language version is based on, so you can see how it compares to the original.

We’re not doing this to make money, get attention, or make a name for ourselves. We just want to make licenses that people can read and understand. If we get organizations (ok, maybe, shame them) to change their licenses to use plain language, that’s even better. We want to see plain language become the norm for licenses and any legal document, not just a niche thing. We think that’s good for everyone.