What license to choose for my PhD thesis? I will soon submit my PhD thesis. The thesis is written in Latex and version controlled with git. I want to add a license file, but don't know what to choose. For my software, I choose the permissive MIT license, but I have no clue if that is suitable for a thesis as well. Searching on the web, I found that many use the Creative Commons (CC), but I don't know why. And there are also several types of CC. What I want is: everyone can

use the knowledge in the thesis even for commercial purposes, supposing that my work is cited
use, modify and redistribute the helper tools (files for compilation, document format, etc.) supposing that the original license is kept

EDIT
Finally, based on your suggestions, I chose the CC-BY 4.0 license and set the repository containing the sources to public.
CC-BY seems to be the industry standard license for open access papers, see Why CC-BY? for a discussion of the reasons. It's a well-known license, that allows various kinds of later use (including commercial), and hence it's a good choice for papers and (I think) theses as well. The BY part requires "appropriate attribution". For academic reuse you can pretty much count on the attribution coming in the form of citations.

Note, however, that CC-BY is not a "viral" license. That is, modifications don't have to preserve the license. If you want that property, there is the CC-BY-SA (share-alike) variant, but my understanding is that it can make it problematic to create repositories of documents. This is one of the reasons for recommending CC-BY for papers. However, you could always put a CC-BY license on the thesis, and a stricter one on the helper tools.

Just make sure that whatever you choose is compatible with any copyright policy imposed by your university. Places I'm familiar with just request non-exclusive distribution rights to put it in their online library databases, but I imagine other places can be more restrictive.