Charity is a public LICENSE for open software that brings the approach of MIT and BSD licenses into the twenty-first century. Parity makes your software free to use by almost anyone.
Charity is based on The Parity Public License, which shares many of the same terms. Charity is a "free for everybody" license. Parity is a "free for open source" license.
Charity improves on previous permissive licenses in several ways.
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Charity is written to be read, in plain language, with a simple "here's your permission, and here are the rules" structure. The whole license fits on 26 lines of 65 columns.
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Charity gives explicit patent permission, with a patent-termination clause, like Apache 2.0, but without its wordiness.
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Charity helps others find your source code and contribute back, by requiring that users keep a notice about where to find source, in addition to your copyright notice.
Charity is one member of a family of licenses published by Artless Devices LLC for licensezero.com:
- Parity, a strong reciprocal license
- Charity, a permissive license
- Prosperity, a noncommercial license