Can I use open source code for commercial use?

Yes — every license covered here permits commercial use. What differs is what you owe when you distribute: permissive licenses require notices only; weak copyleft requires disclosing the copyleft-licensed parts; strong copyleft requires the whole distributed work to be open-sourced; AGPL extends that to network use.

Is CC0 free for commercial use?

Yes. CC0-1.0 is a public-domain dedication with no notice obligations. The one caveat in the dataset: No patent grant. Patent rights are not waived, which can matter for commercial products.

Which licenses let me ship a closed-source product?

All six permissive licenses (MIT, BSD-2-Clause, BSD-3-Clause, ISC, Apache-2.0, BSL-1.0) and both public-domain dedications, with notices only. Weak-copyleft licenses (MPL-2.0, EPL-2.0, LGPL) also allow it as long as the copyleft-licensed parts stay open. The GPL family and AGPL do not.

Commercial-friendly open-source licenses

Every license below permits commercial use. The real question is what each one requires when you distribute — whether a closed-source binary is possible, and whether hosting as SaaS triggers source disclosure. The governing rule from the dataset: "Permissive: include notices (Apache also needs NOTICE + change statements). Weak copyleft: disclose only the modified library/files and, for LGPL static linking, provide a relink path. Strong copyleft (GPL): NOT possible to keep proprietary if GPL code is in the derivative work. AGPL: same as GPL plus network rules."

License	Closed-source binary?	SaaS disclosure?	Commercial use, in short
MIT	Yes	No	Yes.
BSD-2-Clause	Yes	No	Yes.
BSD-3-Clause	Yes	No	Yes.
ISC	Yes	No	Yes.
Apache-2.0	Yes	No	Yes.
BSL-1.0	Yes	No	Yes.
Unlicense	Yes	No	Yes.
CC0-1.0	Yes	No	Yes.
MPL-2.0	Yes — copyleft parts stay open	No	Yes.
EPL-2.0	Yes — copyleft parts stay open	No	Yes.
LGPL-2.1	Yes — copyleft parts stay open	No	Yes.
LGPL-3.0	Yes — copyleft parts stay open	No	Yes.
GPL-2.0-only	No	No	Commercial use is permitted, but distributing the combined work requires releasing the whole work under GPL-2.0-only with source.
GPL-2.0-or-later	No	No	Commercial use is permitted, but distributing the combined work requires releasing the whole work under GPL-2.0-or-later with source.
GPL-3.0-only	No	No	Commercial use is permitted, but distributing the combined work requires releasing the whole work under GPL-3.0-only with source.
AGPL-3.0	No	Yes	Commercial use is permitted, but distributing the combined work requires releasing the whole work under AGPL-3.0-only with source.

Combining licenses in one product

Commercial-friendliness of each license individually doesn't settle whether your particular dependency set can ship together. Check your actual combination in the tool or scan the full compatibility matrix.

FAQ

Can I use open source code for commercial use?: Yes — every license covered here permits commercial use. What differs is what you owe when you distribute: permissive licenses require notices only; weak copyleft requires disclosing the copyleft-licensed parts; strong copyleft requires the whole distributed work to be open-sourced; AGPL extends that to network use.
Is CC0 free for commercial use?: Yes. CC0-1.0 is a public-domain dedication with no notice obligations. The one caveat in the dataset: No patent grant. Patent rights are not waived, which can matter for commercial products.
Which licenses let me ship a closed-source product?: All six permissive licenses (MIT, BSD-2-Clause, BSD-3-Clause, ISC, Apache-2.0, BSL-1.0) and both public-domain dedications, with notices only. Weak-copyleft licenses (MPL-2.0, EPL-2.0, LGPL) also allow it as long as the copyleft-licensed parts stay open. The GPL family and AGPL do not.