How to determine which licenses can be used for commercial purposes and which are not?

Question

Licenses for software and other works

There is a wide variety of different ways of licensing software, with many incomprehensible abbreviations that are not always clear to the common man: MIT, GPL ... etc. How to understand all this diversity once and for all?

Answer 1

So there half is possible, but with different conditions. Therefore, the question is not clear. You still need to read the license and comply with the conditions.
Without a second thought, only Public Domain can be used.

Answer 2

> How to determine which licenses can be used for commercial purposes and which are not?
I mean, works on the terms of licenses, one must think.
> How to understand all this diversity once and for all?
The way to understand the diversity of something is called classification .
The main categories are free and non-free works. And a significant part of the answer to your title question is already at this level of classification - any free works (= works under free licenses) can be used for commercial purposes.
But for the record, it's worth pointing out that the second most important level of categorization within free licenses is copyleft licenses .(copyleft) and lax permissive licenses.
Another (parallel) way of classifying is pairwise matching of licenses that allow the creation of derivative works in terms of their so-called. compatibility, that is, the ability to combine works on their terms within the same work. Due to the importance of the GNU GPL, the most important in practice is compatibility with it.
An authoritative classification of specific generic (and simply known) licenses according to the above three criteria can be found in the Miscellaneous Licenses and Their Comments list , edited by the FSF Licensing Lab.