Open source icon licenses compared

Icon sets borrow their licenses from two worlds: software licenses such as MIT and Apache 2.0, and content licenses such as Creative Commons. Icon fonts add a third, the SIL Open Font License. All of them let you use the icons, including commercially, but they differ in what they ask in return. This guide compares the six you're most likely to meet, and explains why none of them covers the brands that crypto logos represent.

This is general information, not legal advice. The license text is the authority: read the one that ships with your icons, and ask a lawyer if your use depends on the details.

At a glance

The permissive software licenses

MIT and ISC

MIT and ISC are the shortest common licenses. Both grant broad permission to use, copy, modify and distribute; MIT spells out more verbs, including merge, publish, sublicense and sell, while ISC says "for any purpose with or without fee". Both ask only that the copyright notice and permission notice appear in copies. Neither requires a visible credit or a record of what you changed.

For an icon set, MIT or ISC means: ship the license text with any copy of the icons you pass on, and you've met the terms. The MIT license guide goes through every clause.

Apache 2.0

Apache 2.0 is permissive too, but longer and more specific. When you redistribute the work, you must:

• include a copy of the license;
• keep the existing copyright, patent, trademark and attribution notices;
• pass on the contents of the NOTICE file, if the work has one;
• make modified files carry prominent notices stating that you changed them.

It also includes an explicit patent license from contributors, which ends for anyone who sues claiming the work infringes a patent. That matters more for code than for drawings.

For icons, the practical difference from MIT is marking changes. If you recolor or redraw Apache-licensed icons and redistribute them, a comment at the top of each changed SVG is a simple way to do it. If you run the files through an optimizer, make sure it doesn't strip that comment.

<!-- Modified 2026-11-01: recolored to a single fill. Original from [icon set name], Apache License 2.0 -->
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 24 24">
  <path d="M12 2 4 12l8 10 8-10z" />
</svg>

Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons licenses were made for creative works such as images, text and music, which suits icon artwork. Creative Commons itself recommends software licenses for code, which is one reason some icon projects put the artwork under a CC license and the accompanying code under MIT. The whole family is described at creativecommons.org/licenses.

CC BY 4.0

CC BY lets you share and adapt the work for any purpose, including commercially, as long as you give attribution. Under version 4.0, that means:

• crediting the creator, in the way they ask if they specify one;
• keeping the copyright notice and providing a link or reference to the license;
• indicating whether you modified the work.

You can do this in any reasonable way for the medium: a caption, a credits page, an About screen. You also can't add terms or technical restrictions that stop others from doing what the license allows. The guide on crediting an icon set has example credit lines.

Other CC licenses add conditions you'll occasionally see on icons: SA (share-alike, so adaptations must use the same license), NC (non-commercial use only) and ND (no adaptations). An NC or ND set is a poor fit for most product work: a commercial app falls outside NC, and a recolored or resized icon may count as an adaptation under ND.

CC0

CC0 is less a license than a waiver. The creator gives up copyright and related rights as far as the law allows, with a fallback license where a full waiver isn't possible. You can use CC0 icons without a credit or a notice. Crediting anyway is still courteous and helps people trace the source.

The SIL Open Font License, for icon fonts

Icon fonts are fonts, so they often use the SIL Open Font License (OFL) 1.1. Its terms are built around fonts:

• you can use, study, modify and redistribute the font, including bundled with commercial software;
• you can't sell the font by itself;
• copies must include the copyright notice and the license;
• modified versions can't use the original's Reserved Font Names, if it declares any, without permission;
• the font, original or modified, must stay under the OFL, but documents and designs you make with it don't have to.

Some icon packages split licenses across their parts: the OFL for font files, a CC license for the artwork and MIT for code. When you switch from a set's font to its SVG files, check which license applies to which folder. The guide on icon fonts vs SVG covers why many projects make that switch.

Licenses and trademarks

For crypto logos, this is the part that matters most. Every license above deals with copyright, the rights in the drawing. None of them grants rights to the brand a drawing represents:

• Apache 2.0 says it grants no permission to use the licensor's trade names, trademarks, service marks or product names, beyond describing where the work came from.
• CC BY 4.0 states that patent and trademark rights are not licensed.
• CC0 states that trademark and patent rights held by the person applying it are not waived or affected.
• MIT and ISC don't mention trademarks at all.

Those clauses concern the licensor's own marks. With crypto logos the situation is simpler still: the authors of an icon set never owned the brands they drew, so they have no trademark rights to pass on under any license. The artwork can be MIT or CC0; the Ethereum, Solana or USDC brand still belongs to whoever owns it. See crypto logos and trademarks for what that means in practice.

Checking what you actually have

Before you commit icons to a product:

1. Find the license file in the source (LICENSE, LICENSE.md, COPYING), not just a summary on a website.
2. Check whether different folders carry different licenses, such as fonts, SVGs and code.
3. Keep a copy of the license with the icons in your project, plus a note of the source and date.
4. If there's no license at all, assume you don't have permission to reuse the files. Without a license, ordinary copyright applies.