LaTeX template licences

This page is the survey. For what a licence is and which parts of a document it governs, seetemplate licensing, which covers the conceptual side and the template-versus-your-content distinction.

What the catalogue actually carries

Each of the 909 templates here records the licence of the upstream work it is built on. Grouped into families:

These families do not sum to 909. A licence record is free text because the real answer is often compound — "CC0-1.0 for starter files; LPPL-1.3 for upstream class" is a genuine entry — so a template counts toward every family its record mentions. Flattening those into one tidy identifier would state a simpler legal position than the evidence supports.

The LPPL, which is the one worth understanding

The LaTeX Project Public License appears in 336 of the 909records, which makes it the most common thing you will meet. It is a free software licence, but it is unusual, and it is unusual in a way that is routinely described incorrectly.

Its distinctive machinery is the idea of a Current Maintainer. The maintainer may modify and redistribute the work without restriction. Anyone else may also modify and redistribute it, but must meet extra conditions — and the point of those conditions is that a document asking for foo.cls should get the behaviourfoo.cls is supposed to have, rather than somebody's altered version of it. That is a real problem for a system where documents name their dependencies and expect them to behave consistently.

The commonly repeated version of the rule is "you must rename the file if you change it". Reading LPPL 1.3c as it ships in TeX Live, that is not quite what it requires. Clause 6a says that a modified component which could stand in for the original mustclearly and unambiguously identify itself as a modified version to the user. Renaming is the customary and simplest way to achieve that — and it is what most people should do — but the binding condition is identification, not the filename as such. Clause 6 also asks for prominent notices describing the changes, and that you distribute the unmodified original alongside, or say where to get it.

The practical consequence for almost everyone: none of this applies to writing a document. Using an LPPL class to typeset your thesis triggers no condition at all. The clauses engage when you hand someone else a modified class file.

The others, briefly

• MIT / BSD / ISC / Apache-2.0. Permissive. Keep the copyright notice with the source if you redistribute it, and you are done. Apache-2.0 adds an explicit patent grant, which is irrelevant to typesetting but harmless.
• CC-BY. You may use, adapt and redistribute, including commercially, provided you give attribution. Note that attribution is acondition of the licence — omitting it is not rudeness, it is non-compliance.
• CC-BY-SA. The same, plus share-alike: a modifiedtemplate you redistribute must carry the same licence. It does not reach your thesis.
• GPL. Copyleft. If you distribute a modified version of the template, distribute its source under the GPL too. Again, the document you produce with it is not a derivative work of the class file in any sense the GPL is concerned with.
• CC0 / Unlicense / public domain. No conditions.

Creative Commons NonCommercial, and why it is a problem

You will encounter CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-SA in the wild, particularly on templates shared through university pages. They are worth flagging because "non-commercial" is both restrictive and vague: it is not settled whether a consultancy report, a thesis written during funded research, or a book you later sell counts. A template repository generally cannot redistribute NC-licensed work either, because a catalogue that carries advertising or is operated commercially may itself be a commercial use.

For completeness rather than implication: no template in this catalogue is NC-licensed. One record notes that its upstream README additionally offers CC-BY-NC-4.0 while the class sources themselves carry LPPL — which is exactly the sort of ambiguity worth reading a licence file for.

The 106 templates with no established licence

This is the most honest and least comfortable number on the page. For106 of 909 records, no licence could be established from the source: nothing in the repository, nothing in the class file header, nothing on the page it came from.

An absent licence is not permission. The legal default is all rights reserved, so strictly you have no grant to redistribute those at all. In practice, work published as a template carries an obvious implication that you may use it for its evident purpose, and nobody has ever been troubled for typesetting a dissertation. But if you intend to publish, sell, or redistribute a modified version, the honest position is that the permission is not documented, and asking the author is cheap.

The most common exact values

Family grouping hides how much variety there is in how licences are actually stated. The twelve commonest strings, verbatim:

So what may you actually do?

Taking the questions people actually ask, in order:

• Use it for my thesis or paper? Yes, under every licence here. This is the use the work was published for, and it triggers no condition in LPPL, MIT, CC-BY, or the GPL.
• Publish the resulting document, or sell it? Yes. Your words are yours. The one thing to check is not the template licence at all but the fonts and any logos — fonts have separate terms and producing a PDF embeds them, and an institutional logo that arrived inside a template is usually trademarked and not yours to reuse.
• Modify the class file for my own use? Yes, universally. Conditions attach to distribution, not to editing your own copy.
• Give my modified version to my research group? This is distribution. Under LPPL, identify it as modified — renaming is the usual way. Under CC-BY, attribute. Under GPL or CC-BY-SA, keep the licence.
• Sell the template itself? Permitted by MIT, CC-BY, LPPL and the GPL, subject to each one's conditions. Forbidden by NonCommercial terms, and unavailable to you where no licence is stated.

Two things the licence is not about

Bundled class files. 183 of the 909 templates here ship the class or style file inside the archive rather than relying on your TeX distribution to have it. That matters for licensing because it means you are receiving — and, if you pass the folder on, redistributing — the upstream work itself, not just a document that calls it.

Attribution. 128 records are marked as requiring attribution. That is a licence condition to satisfy in the document or its source, not an optional credit.

This page is general background, not legal advice. Licence records here describe the upstream work as we found it; where a record says the licence could not be established, that is the finding, not a judgement that the work is unlicensed. For anything with real stakes, read the licence file that came with the template.