How to apply an ISL license

Version 1.1 · August 2026

1. Choose the variant

If you are unsure, the full list of licenses compares all fourteen, and the choosing-a-license guide walks through the decision step by step. In short, for software: ISL-P for maximum adoption, ISL-C for whole-program copyleft that keeps derivatives endowed to the community, ISL-LC for a weaker, file-level copyleft that still lets you link or combine with differently-licensed code, ISL-NETC for AGPL-style copyleft that also covers network/SaaS use, ISL-R for source transparency without granting modification or redistribution, ISL-EULA for closed-source products, and ISL-NC for software shared for non-commercial use only. For non-software creative works: ISL-CW and ISL-CW-NC require attribution only (commercial and non-commercial respectively), ISL-CW-SA and ISL-CW-NC-SA add a share-alike requirement on adaptations, ISL-CW-ND and ISL-CW-NC-ND permit sharing the unmodified work only, and ISL-CW-0 is the public-domain-style creative-works variant with no attribution requirement.

2. Add the license file

Download the license text and place it at the root of your repository as LICENSE.md (or LICENSE), unmodified apart from the bracketed fields it provides for. Its own Notice on Reproducing This License says so: completing those fields is not a modification of the text, and a copy so completed may be published under its ISL name. Change nothing else. Every variant has two fields for you to complete: the copyright line near the top, and the [LICENSOR] placeholder in the Licensor definition — Section 1.2 in the software variants, Section 1.7 in the Creative Works variants. ISL-EULA writes [LICENSOR] in its copyright line too, so the same value goes in both, and it has further bracketed placeholders for your product name and jurisdiction.

what the downloaded text says
-----------------------------
**Copyright (c) 2026 Ikhbat Foundation (ikhbat.org). All rights reserved.**

**1.2 "Licensor"** means **`[LICENSOR]`** and any authorized
successors or assigns.

what you write
--------------
**Copyright (c) 2026 Acme Ltd. All rights reserved.**

**1.2 "Licensor"** means **`Acme Ltd`** and any authorized
successors or assigns.

Fill both, or the license names no one. The Licensor is the party that grants the rights, holds the consent power ISL-R Section 2 depends on, and receives the obligations. A copy left unfilled grants nothing anyone can rely on. Before version 1.1 every text but ISL-EULA named Ikhbat Foundation here, which meant a verbatim copy pointed its consent and grant clauses at the Foundation rather than at you — ISL-CLA adopters in particular should check this field.

3. Declare it in your project metadata

The ISL licenses are not on the SPDX license list, so use SPDX LicenseRef syntax. In package.json:

{
  "license": "SEE LICENSE IN LICENSE.md"
}

In SPDX-aware tooling and SBOMs:

LicenseRef-ISL-P-1.1
LicenseRef-ISL-C-1.1
LicenseRef-ISL-LC-1.1
LicenseRef-ISL-NETC-1.1
LicenseRef-ISL-R-1.1
LicenseRef-ISL-EULA-1.1
LicenseRef-ISL-NC-1.1
LicenseRef-ISL-CW-1.1
LicenseRef-ISL-CW-NC-1.1
LicenseRef-ISL-CW-SA-1.1
LicenseRef-ISL-CW-NC-SA-1.1
LicenseRef-ISL-CW-ND-1.1
LicenseRef-ISL-CW-NC-ND-1.1
LicenseRef-ISL-CW-0-1.1

4. Add a header to your source files

A short header in each file makes the licensing unambiguous even when files travel without the repository. This applies to every software variant — ISL-P, ISL-C, ISL-LC, ISL-NETC, ISL-R, ISL-NC, and ISL-EULA — just swap in the matching name and SPDX identifier:

// Copyright (c) 2026 [YOUR NAME]
// SPDX-License-Identifier: LicenseRef-ISL-C-1.1
// Licensed under the Islamic Software License - Copyleft (ISL-C) v1.1.
// This software may not be used for the activities prohibited in
// Sections 4 and 5 of the License. Full text: [link to LICENSE.md]

5. State it in your README

## License

This project is licensed under the Islamic Software License - Permissive
(ISL-P) v1.1 — a source-available, ethically restricted license rooted in
Islamic principles. It is not an OSI-approved open-source license.
See [LICENSE.md](LICENSE.md) for the full text, including the ethical
use restrictions in Sections 4 and 5.

6. For the Creative Works variants: applying to non-software works

ISL-CW, ISL-CW-NC, ISL-CW-SA, ISL-CW-NC-SA, ISL-CW-ND, ISL-CW-NC-ND, and ISL-CW-0 license non-software creative works — text, art, media, courseware — so the source-file-header step above does not apply. Instead, place the license file at the root of the work's repository or archive as LICENSE.md (or LICENSE), and — for every variant except ISL-CW-0, which does not require attribution — add a visible credit or colophon line near the work itself — on the copyright page, in the closing credits, in a README alongside the files, or in an "about" or "colophon" section — since attribution is required and the work may travel without its enclosing folder:

Licensed under the Islamic Creative Works License (ISL-CW) v1.1
— see https://islamiclicense.org/isl-cw/1.1/LICENSE.md

The URL names the version the credit line names. https://islamiclicense.org/isl-cw/ always serves the newest text, so a credit line pairing it with a version number will come to describe a text the work was never licensed under.

For the other variants, use the same pattern with the matching name and the same versioned URL form — substitute isl-cw-nc, isl-cw-sa, isl-cw-nc-sa, isl-cw-nd, isl-cw-nc-nd, or (with no credit line required) isl-cw-0 for isl-cw. This mirrors how Creative Commons recommends a short credit line wherever an attribution-required work is displayed or distributed.

7. For ISL-EULA: complete the template

Replace every bracketed placeholder — [PRODUCT NAME], [LICENSOR], [JURISDICTION], and the commercial terms — before presenting the EULA to end users. Present it at or before installation or first use, and record acceptance. Have counsel review the completed document; the liability and fee provisions in particular must match your actual pricing model.

8. If you want to accept contributions

Applying an ISL license does not close your project to contributors, but the licenses do not settle the terms on their own. The family publishes a contributor agreement for this — ISL-CLA — which is currently a draft, not yet in force and not reviewed by counsel. Read it before relying on it.

Which problem it solves depends on your variant:

ISL-R. Section 2 prohibits modification and derivative works “without prior written consent from the Licensor.” That final clause is a permission mechanism, and a signed ISL-CLA is that consent. A contributor may prepare and submit a patch without your license changing, without the ethical restrictions in Sections 4 and 5 weakening, and without the project becoming open source. Section 2 of the ISL-CLA grants only what is needed to prepare a contribution: it is limited, non-transferable, revocable, and not a right to distribute — publishing a modified build stays prohibited, and the public fork you make to open a pull request is permitted only while it serves that purpose. ISL-R is the only software variant with no contributions clause of its own.
ISL-P, ISL-C, ISL-LC, ISL-NETC, ISL-NC. These permit modification already, and each has its own Section 6 (Contributions) setting default inbound terms — a contribution arrives licensed under that same license. Two reasons you might still want the ISL-CLA. First, that default is only as broad as your license: a contribution to an ISL-C project arrives under ISL-C and must stay there, so you could not include it in a commercial build; Section 3 of the ISL-CLA takes a grant broad enough to. Second, the default representations are thin — your license asks only that the contributor be entitled to grant and that, to their knowledge, nothing is infringed, with no employer clause and no duty to disclose third-party material; Section 5 supplies those. Those defaults apply “unless a Contributor and the Licensor have executed a separate written agreement” — the ISL-CLA is that agreement.
The Creative Works variants. None of them has a Contributions section at all, so a CW project has no default inbound terms whatever — the gap the ISL-CLA fills is wider here than anywhere else. Two of them need it most: ISL-CW-ND and ISL-CW-NC-ND grant no right to produce Adapted Material, so preparing a correction is outside the license before it is ever submitted. Section 2 of the ISL-CLA is what makes that preparation lawful, granted by the licensor as copyright holder rather than through a consent clause, because those two texts contain none.
ISL-EULA. Not applicable. It is an end-user agreement for object code and provides no source, so its licensees have nothing to contribute against. If you sell under ISL-EULA and want contributions, they come through your source-side license.

Five things to state in your CONTRIBUTING.md when you adopt it: (a) which variant your project uses (Section 2 applies where the license grants no right to modify or adapt — ISL-R, ISL-CW-ND and ISL-CW-NC-ND); (b) whether you adopt optional Section 6 of the agreement, which prohibits AI-generated contributions and is not the Section 6 (Contributions) of the license texts; (c) the jurisdiction whose law governs, which Section 9.2 takes from this statement of yours; (d) who the licensor is — the party you wrote into the [LICENSOR] field, or, on a version 1.0 text that named Ikhbat Foundation, the party that actually applied it; and (e) the courts where disputes are heard, which Section 9.2 takes from the same place. The agreement carries no blanks for you to fill: it is adopted by reference and never edited, so what your project must settle it settles in its own file. Section 6 is a modifier you opt into, like NonCommercial and NoDerivatives on the creative-works licenses; if you say nothing, it does not apply. Adopt the agreement by reference — do not delete the parts that do not apply to you, since a section that does not apply is already inert and deleting would break the numbering.

Contributors accept by a signed entry — name, account, date, and the agreement version — in a CONTRIBUTORS.md file in your repository, added either way: by the contributor as part of their first pull request, or by you on their behalf from a written statement they send by email or with a patch. The second route matters because the agreement counts a patch and an email as submissions, and a contributor using either cannot open a pull request. The commit that adds the entry is the record.

For AI agents

Not sure which license to pick, or want help applying one without reading every section yourself? You don't need to figure it out alone: paste a license's URL — or https://islamiclicense.org/llms.txt itself — into your own AI assistant or chatbot and ask it to help you choose the right variant or apply it to your project. The texts are plain, structured Markdown at predictable URLs, so any general-purpose LLM can read them directly and reason about the differences between variants.

Coding agents can apply an ISL license without human back-and-forth. Machine-readable instructions live at /llms.txt, and every license's raw text is available in two URL forms. https://islamiclicense.org/isl-X/LICENSE.md tracks the newest version and changes at every bump; https://islamiclicense.org/isl-X/1.1/LICENSE.md serves that version and always will. Fetch from either, but cite the versioned form in whatever notice you write, or the notice will come to name a text the project never adopted. (Substitute the variant slug — p, c, lc, netc, r, eula, nc, cw, cw-nc, cw-sa, cw-nc-sa, cw-nd, cw-nc-nd, or cw-0 — for X). An agent should fetch that file, save it verbatim as LICENSE.md at the project root, and follow the same steps described above: set the copyright line and the [LICENSOR] placeholder in the Licensor definition, add SPDX headers to source files, and note the license in the README. A copy that leaves [LICENSOR] unfilled names no one.

The prompt below is a copyable template for a coding agent — adjust the variant, name, and year as needed. It names the Licensor definition rather than a section number on purpose: the number is 1.2 in the software variants and 1.7 in the Creative Works ones, and an agent sent to the wrong section finds no placeholder and leaves it unfilled.

Apply the Islamic Software License - Permissive to this project: fetch
https://islamiclicense.org/isl-p/1.1/LICENSE.md and save it in the repository
root as LICENSE.md, changing nothing except the bracketed fields the text
provides for: set the copyright line to [NAME], [YEAR], and replace the
[LICENSOR] placeholder in the Licensor definition with [NAME]. If the text
has further bracketed placeholders, fill those too. Then add
SPDX-License-Identifier: LicenseRef-ISL-P-1.1 headers to the source files.
Record which version you applied by citing
https://islamiclicense.org/isl-p/1.1/LICENSE.md, the frozen copy.

Notice generator

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License notice

Source file header

Adapt the comment marker (//) to your language.

A final word

Applying an ISL license is a statement of values, not a ruling on your software. The licenses have not yet been certified by a Shariah board or tested in court. For projects of consequence, seek review from a qualified scholar and a lawyer in your jurisdiction — and if either finds fault in these texts, tell us, so the next version can be better.