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Modern Permissive

Your License: Blue Oak Model License 1.0.0

Plain-English permissive license with a patent grant

Why This License?

  • Written in plain English - readable in two minutes without a lawyer
  • Includes a patent grant (like Apache 2.0) in a fraction of the length
  • Notice requirement can be satisfied with just a link, not the full text
  • Unique 30-day cure period: an accidental compliance slip is fixable instead of instantly terminating your license
  • Explicitly irrevocable, and OSI-approved

Used by popular projects:

glob, lru-cache, minimatch, rimraf, (the npm creator's core packages, installed transitively by nearly every Node project)

What It Allows

  • Commercial use
  • Modification
  • Distribution
  • Patent use
  • Private use

What It Requires

  • Provide the license text or a link to it with copies

What It Forbids

  • Liability
  • Warranty

Copy Your LICENSE File

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# Blue Oak Model License

Version 1.0.0

## Purpose

This license gives everyone as much permission to work with
this software as possible, while protecting contributors
from liability.

## Acceptance

In order to receive this license, you must agree to its
rules.  The rules of this license are both obligations
under that agreement and conditions to your license.
You must not do anything with this software that triggers
a rule that you cannot or will not follow.

## Copyright

Each contributor licenses you to do everything with this
software that would otherwise infringe that contributor's
copyright in it.

## Notices

You must ensure that everyone who gets a copy of
any part of this software from you, with or without
changes, also gets the text of this license or a link to
<https://blueoakcouncil.org/license/1.0.0>.

## Excuse

If anyone notifies you in writing that you have not
complied with [Notices](#notices), you can keep your
license by taking all practical steps to comply within 30
days after the notice.  If you do not do so, your license
ends immediately.

## Patent

Each contributor licenses you to do everything with this
software that would otherwise infringe any patent claims
they can license or become able to license.

## Reliability

No contributor can revoke this license.

## No Liability

***As far as the law allows, this software comes as is,
without any warranty or condition, and no contributor
will be liable to anyone for any damages related to this
software or this license, under any kind of legal claim.***

Adding to GitHub

  1. Create a file named LICENSE in your repository root
  2. Paste the license text above
  3. Commit with message: Add Blue Oak Model License 1.0.0 license
  4. GitHub will automatically detect and display the license

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The trade-off: recognition

On drafting quality alone, Blue Oak arguably improves on MIT (which has no patent grant) and Apache 2.0 (which takes ~10 pages to say something similar). Adoption is real but concentrated: the npm creator (isaacs) relicensed his core packages — glob, lru-cache, minimatch, rimraf — to Blue Oak, so it ships transitively in nearly every Node project, and GitHub detects it automatically. Still, it isn't in GitHub's license picker, and corporate legal departments that instantly wave Apache 2.0 through may flag an unfamiliar license for manual review. Apache 2.0 also has two substantive protections Blue Oak omits: defensive patent termination (your patent grant to someone ends if they sue over patents) and an explicit trademark reservation. If frictionless enterprise adoption is your goal, Apache 2.0 remains the safer default. If you value a license your users can actually read — especially for small, widely-installed libraries — Blue Oak is an excellent, OSI-approved choice.