The cabal setup recognises a small set of licences which I don't think are well explained. I'm trying to put together a canonical list for setting up new projects. GPL: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt LGPL: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.txt Thankfully the FSF are particularly anal^W well-organised about this kind of thing and they make it very easy to determine what each licence is and how to apply it BSD3/BSD4: There appears to be one explicitly-named BSD licence on the OSI site. There is also a closely related MIT licence. I don't know which would be which, if these are the two referred to in the licence data type. http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html PublicDomain: The Creative Commons people have a public domain licence, though I am uncertain whether it is intended for code. Maybe this doesn't matter when what you're saying is "I give up all rights"? http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/ AllRightsReserved: This is the very opposite of a PD licence and, I believe, the default licence when there is no other explicitly stated. However it would be nice to say as much rather than relying on people's legal knowledge. ;) OtherLicense: This one's easy enough... If anyone can fill in gaps and correct the errors in the above I think it would be useful. Obviously if this has been discussed elsewhere just point me off in the right direction! :) Cheers, D.