Click here for the announcement page.
Since 2012, TLDRLegal has been demystifying Open Source/Software licenses with simple, practical summaries. So far, our community has sent over 1.5 Million license summaries to hundreds of thousands of people across the globe and brought a peer-reviewed quality to our guides.
Today we are proud to launch our Verified Licenses in an effort to apply top legal expertise to our most visible license summaries. This means a select and growing list of licenses will be put under review by some of the top experts in Open Source licensing.
To learn more about who reviews our summaries and which ones are currently verified, click here.
As the list and quality of our verified content grows, we'll release our internal API against verified content. Look forward to future updates!
For the past few months we've been working hard to rebuild TLDRLegal from the ground-up. It's releasing today and replacing the old site (which you can still access here) as a public alpha test. Here's some highlights out of our new features:
Collaborative License Editing
This is one of the biggest new features. Now anyone can suggest an edit to a license summary, its full text or any piece of it. Clicking “Edit” on any license will let you start editing its content.
Unless you manage the page (were the one to submit the license), your change will be submitted and reviewed by its manager(s) before it's integrated.

When you submit a change, they appear in the "Changesets" tab of the license. The community has a chance to discuss the change and vote on it to help the license's manager decide which changes to accept and which ones to deny.
Community Features
You can still use all the old features of TLDRLegal without registering, but to participate in the site you need to have an account. There's a couple of basic starting features to help you get plugged into the community.
- Personalized dashboard
- User profile
- Reputation points & notifications for user actions
More complex features are coming soon.
Developer API
One of the most requested features was an open API, and the new TLDRLegal was built completely with this in mind. Everything was designed around a goal to provide a really easy and accessible API -- and we think we've done a good job.
TLDRLegal currently runs off of an internal API, which is temporarily hidden away and is coming soon. The temporary docs will be here. Here's some basic current & planned features:
- All data in JSON
- Simple and straightforward schemas (easy data access centered around key-value)
- Data partials
- Built-in pagination and GET query params
- Impersonation to do authenticated operations off-site
- Rendering license partials in HTML and as images (helpful for non-web apps)
Terms of Service
TLDRLegal now includes Terms of Service as a type of license alongside all current Code Licenses -- Here's an example.
We're releasing this feature after many requests in hopes to expand some of TLDRLegal's coverage. So far this is still in testing, but feel free to use it plenty.
Coming Soon...
Basic Features:
- "Compare" has been temporarily removed and will be replaced by a significant better version built around your previous feedback.
- Polished API & Docs
- Improved Terms of Service editing UI
Community Features:
- Organizations & Groups
- Badges and Achievements
- User and Community Index
- General Discussion Hub (for now use the feedback tab on the right to discuss features)
- Redesigns of all current user-oriented pages
- Polish Discussion Features
Thanks to all of those that helped us test this new build! We're always looking for feedback to make this better, so use the black "Feedback" tab on the right or email kevin@tldrlegal.com whenever you have something to say.