Licence Encyclopedia

What is DRY?

DRY — an evidence-based encyclopaedia of digital rights. Put simply: it explains what you can and cannot do with someone else’s digital content — whether it’s code, an image, a font, a dataset, an AI model or text — and under what conditions.

What is a licence?

A licence is permission granted by the rights holder to use their work. It specifies three things: what you are permitted to do (copy, modify, distribute, sell, incorporate into your own product, train an ML model), under what conditions (attribute authorship, make the source code available, retain the same licence) and what you are not permitted to do.

The golden rule: accessibility ≠ permission

The fact that a file is freely available — on GitHub, Kaggle, YouTube or in search results — does not in itself grant the right to copy, modify or use it commercially. Such rights are granted only by a licence or by law. If there is no licence, the default is ‘all rights reserved’.

What each card shows

Not just the name. For each licence individually: what is permitted, what conditions are mandatory, what is prohibited, what it is compatible with — as well as the official source text, version, date of verification and revision history.

What is covered

Software and open-source licences (MIT, BSD, Apache, GPL, LGPL, AGPL, MPL…), Creative Commons and open content, photos/videos/music/fonts, open data and databases, licensing of AI models and datasets, commercial use and compatibility.

The DRY principle

No fluff — just verified facts. Every statement is backed by an official source, and includes the date and version. This is not legal advice, but verified information to help you make your own decision.