People often ask the Free Software Foundation (FSF) what license is recommended to use for their project. The FSF has written about this publicly before, but the information has been scattered around between different essays, FAQ entries, and license commentaries. This article collects all that information into a single source, to make it easier for people to follow and refer back to.

The recommendations are focused on licensing a work that you create—whether that's a modification of an existing work, or a new original work. These recommendations do not address the issue of combining existing material under different licenses. If you're looking for help with that, please check the FSF license FAQ.