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How are the contents of the Overleaf (formerly writeLaTeX) gallery licensed?

We require that all templates, examples and articles published in the gallery have clear license information, but any license is permitted (at our discretion). The choice of license is entirely up to the contributor, but we recommend the following:

  • Use the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license for articles and examples. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organisation that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. They describe CC BY 4.0 as follows:
    This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials.
  • Use the LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL) for templates. The LaTeX project is the open source project that develops LaTeX itself. LaTeX and most of the contributed packages are licensed under the LPPL, so putting your work under the same license is the simplest approach.

There are many licenses to choose from, and the relationships between them are complex, so we recommend keeping it simple and sticking to one of these two options.

If you find an example in our gallery that does not have clear license information, or which has contradictory license information, please let us know, and we will try to resolve the issue with the contributor.