Chapter 9 License your GitBook

In the spirit of Open Science, it is good to think about making your course materials Open Source. That means that other people can use them. In principle, if you publish materials online without license information, you hold the copyright to those materials. If you want them to be Open Source, you must include a license. It is not always obvious what license to choose.

The Creative Commons licenses are typically suitable for course materials. This GitBook, for example, is licensed under CC-BY 4.0. That means you can use and remix it as you like, but you must credit the original source.

If your project is more focused on software or source code, consider using the GNU GPL v3 license instead.

You can find more information about the Creative Commons Licenses here. Specific licenses that might be useful are:

• CC0 (“No Rights Reserved”), everybody can do what they want with your work.
• CC-BY 4.0 (“Attribution”), everybody can do what they want with your work, but they must credit you. Note that this license may not be suitable for software or source code!

For compatibility between CC and GNU licenses, see this FAQ.