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2026

University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License

Also known as NCSA, NCSA Open Source License, University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License.

Commercial use
allowed
Share alike
not required
Attribution
required (keep the copyright and license notices)
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Write this as a license text (needs an account) DALICC reads the model above and writes what it permits, requires and prohibits in plain English. Without an account, the Text download above writes the model out from the vocabulary.

Canonical URI https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/NCSA

Permissions

  • Change license by library convention Library convention: family rule 15: Permissive records permit relicensing. Replacing the license of the work, or of an adaptation, with another license, or changing its terms.

    Duties

    • Use a compliant license by library convention Library convention: family rule 15: Permissive records permit relicensing. Choosing a replacement license that stays compliant with the terms of the original license.
  • Charge distribution fee from the text Charging a fee for the act of providing a copy of the work to someone else.
  • Commercial use from the text Using the work to generate income, directly or indirectly, for example by selling it or by using it in advertising.
  • Derivative works from the text Distributing an adaptation of the work and making it available to the public.
  • Derive from the text Creating a new work from the work, such as a translation, adaptation or arrangement of it or of a part of it.

    Duties

    • Attribution from the text Giving credit to the copyright holders or authors of the work, in the form the licensor asks for.
    • Notice from the text Notice: keeping the license and copyright notices with every copy.
  • Display from the text Showing the work to the public without making a copy the viewer keeps.
  • Distribute from the text Providing copies of the work to the public or to anyone else.

    Duties

    • Attribution from the text Giving credit to the copyright holders or authors of the work, in the form the licensor asks for.
    • Notice from the text Notice: keeping the license and copyright notices with every copy.
  • Grant use from the text The text says: "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal with the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:" Granting third parties the right to use the work.
  • Modified works from the text Distributing a modified version of the work that does not amount to a new, derivative work.
  • Modify from the text Altering the work, for example by updating it, without creating a new work; an alteration that creates a new work is Derive.

    Duties

    • Attribution from the text Giving credit to the copyright holders or authors of the work, in the form the licensor asks for.
    • Notice from the text Notice: keeping the license and copyright notices with every copy.
  • Present from the text Performing the work in public, including by broadcast or other communication to the public.
  • Reproduce from the text Making copies of the work in any form.
  • Sublicense from the text The text says: "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal with the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:" Granting a third party rights in the work under a license of the licensee's own, rather than passing on the original license.

Prohibitions

  • Promote from the text Not permitted: Promote. The text says: "* Neither the names of <Name of Development Group, Name of Institution>, nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this Software without specific prior written permission." Using the name or trademarks of the licensor or of contributors to endorse or promote a product.

License-wide duties

This license states no duties that apply to the work as a whole.

What applies by default

The statements above are the library's reading of this license: each is marked with the sentence it rests on, or as a library convention where the text is not explicit. The statements below are the ones the DALICC reasoner supplies for acts the license says nothing about, from the default rules of the dependency graph it reasons with. Each one names the legal source it rests on. None of it is in the record.

No default rule of that graph reaches this license: it speaks about every act the rules are about.

Clauses

Warranty disclaimer

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.

Limitation of liability

IN NO EVENT SHALL THE CONTRIBUTORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS WITH THE SOFTWARE.

Info

Target asset types
Software
Region / jurisdiction
Worldwide
Validity
Perpetual
Source
https://spdx.org/licenses/NCSA.html
Legal code
http://otm.illinois.edu/uiuc_openSource
This description is published under
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
SPDX identifier
NCSA on the SPDX license list
DALICC identifier
NCSA

This record is published under CC BY 4.0. Credit it as: DALICC License Library, DALICC - Verein zur Förderung der Rechtssicherheit in der Datenbewirtschaftung, https://dalicc.net, CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The license it describes belongs to its publisher.

Use this license

Everything below is generated from this record. Replace the example address with the address of your own work.

JSON sidecar 

{
  "license-uri": "https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/NCSA",
  "license-title": "University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License",
  "spdx-id": "NCSA",
  "attribution": "Copyright (c) [year] [copyright holder]",
  "asset": null,
  "generated-by": "DALICC"
}

RDF, Turtle 

@prefix cc: <http://creativecommons.org/ns#> .

<https://example.org/my-work>
    cc:license <https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/NCSA> .

RDF, JSON-LD 

{
  "@context": {
    "cc": "http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
  },
  "@id": "https://example.org/my-work",
  "cc:license": {
    "@id": "https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/NCSA"
  }
}

HTML attribution 

<p>This work is licensed under <a href="https://dalicc.net/licenselibrary/NCSA" rel="license">University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License</a>.</p>

This license asks for attribution, so the credit line is part of it.

Badge DALICC badge for University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License

Markdown 

[![License: University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License](https://dalicc.net/license-library/NCSA/badge.svg)](https://dalicc.net/license-library/NCSA)

HTML 

<a href="https://dalicc.net/license-library/NCSA"><img src="https://dalicc.net/license-library/NCSA/badge.svg" alt="License: University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License"></a>

Review

Written from the license text by
Giray Havur
Written on
2026-09-15
Second review
not yet done
Record changed since this review
yes (version 2, 2026-09-24)
Findings
9 recorded, 6 applied to the record, 0 proposed

The record models the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License, which joins the MIT grant to the three BSD conditions. The permissions are MIT's, including sublicensing, and the duties and the endorsement prohibition are BSD-3-Clause's.

9 findings

  • major Rubric 3 odrl:permission applied

    The grant reads: "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal with the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software". That is the MIT grant, so the record adds odrl:grantUse and dalicc:sublicense to the permissive core. The grant names sublicensing in as many words, so dalicc:sublicense is a permission, and the clause that lets the recipient of a copy do the same is odrl:grantUse, the term the MIT record already uses for it.

  • major Rubric 5 odrl:duty applied

    The conditions are the three BSD conditions: the copyright notice, the list of conditions and the disclaimer must be retained in source redistributions and reproduced in binary redistributions, so cc:Attribution and cc:Notice are duties on distribute, modify and derive.

  • major Rubric 4 odrl:prohibition applied

    The third condition reads: "Neither the names of <Name of Development Group, Name of Institution>, nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this Software without specific prior written permission." That is dalicc:promote as a prohibition. dalicc:ChangeLicense is prohibited because the text requires the license itself to travel with every copy, which is the reading IscLicense and BSD-3-Clause take of the same clause. The MIT record does not carry the prohibition although its text has the same requirement, so the library is not uniform here. (Corrected on 2026-09-15 by the verification pass: see the rubric 3 finding on relicensing below.)

  • minor Rubric 6 dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer applied

    The disclaimer is the MIT disclaimer with the contributors added; it is split into the warranty sentence and the liability sentence.

  • info Rubric 7 cc:jurisdiction none

    The text names no legal system and no term, so cc:jurisdiction is dalicc:worldwide and dalicc:validityType is dalicc:perpetual.

  • info Rubric 2 odrl:target applied

    One odrl:AssetCollection of dct:type dcmitype:Software, following BSD-3-Clause. The text licenses software and associated documentation.

  • info Rubric 9 record none

    The consistency check with the axioms of dg_default returned no conflicts.

  • info Rubric 10 record none

    The record differs from BSD-3-Clause only in the two permissions that come with the MIT grant, odrl:grantUse and dalicc:sublicense. Everything else is BSD-3-Clause.

  • major Rubric 3 odrl:permission applied

    Library convention 15: a licence that asks for no reciprocity and no source code asks only that the notice travels with the copy, which is a duty on the acts it governs and not a bar on putting the copy under other terms. dalicc:ChangeLicense is therefore a permission here, and the prohibition the earlier reading wrote is removed. The text reads: "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal with the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software ... subject to the following conditions: Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice." The permission carries the dalicc:compliantLicense duty, as Apache-2.0 does, because the notice has to survive the relicensing.

Report an issue The review record as JSON The review checks the model against the license text. It is not legal advice.

History

This license model has 2 versions. Version 2 is the one served today; every earlier version keeps its own address, so a conclusion drawn from one of them can still be checked against it.

  1. Version 2 current2026-09-24 Giray Havur

    The changes since version 1 recorded which sentence of the text each statement rests on and named the license the record itself is published under.

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    5 changes

    • changed permission dalicc:ChangeLicense with duties [dalicc:compliantLicense]

      was permission dalicc:ChangeLicense with duties [dalicc:compliantLicense]

      Manual edit The statement is marked as a library convention, family rule 15: Permissive records permit relicensing: the text does not state it in as many words. Its duty dalicc:compliantLicense is marked as a library convention, family rule 15: Permissive records permit relicensing.

    • changed permission dalicc:sublicense

      was permission dalicc:sublicense

      Manual edit The statement now quotes the sentence of the licence text it rests on: "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal with the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:"

    • changed permission odrl:grantUse

      was permission odrl:grantUse

      Manual edit The statement now quotes the sentence of the licence text it rests on: "Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal with the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:"

    • changed prohibition dalicc:promote

      was prohibition dalicc:promote

      Manual edit The statement now quotes the sentence of the licence text it rests on: "* Neither the names of <Name of Development Group, Name of Institution>, nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this Software without specific prior written permission."

    • added dct:license <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>

      Manual edit Every record is published under CC BY 4.0. cc:license names the record DALICC keeps of that licence; dct:license now names it by the address Creative Commons publishes it at, so that a consumer matching the canonical IRI finds it.

  2. Version 1

    Created from the license text on 2026-09-15 (Permissive: MIT, ISC and BSD-like).

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Every change names the reason behind it: a finding of the content review, one of its library-wide decisions, the metadata that review wrote onto every record, or a hand edit. None of it is legal advice.

Nothing on this page is legal advice. What a license means is decided by its text; ask a legal advisor before you rely on it.