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Selecting a Software Licence?
indraneil asks: "I am a code monkey and have been so for close to 5 years now. I have recently been doing some self-started work that lets me design, implement and test stuff all by myself. A couple of people have liked my prototype and wanted to use it. I would be happy to let others use it, but I am unsure of what license to release it under. My CS course did not include any awareness of licensing and while I am aware of GPL, LGPL, Apache, BSD and Creative Commons licenses, I never got around to understanding them well enough to be able to form an opinion on what suits me best. I notice that SourceForge also expects me to specify my licensing choice, while I am setting up my project. If a person doesn't know about software licensing, where should they educate themselves about the ins and outs, so they can properly choose the license that is right for their project?"
If you are an individual or small team, the most important thing is to keep control over your copyright so you can make money from those people willing to pay for your work.
If you want to open source it, use the GPL and offer a commercial license opt-out. If you use the BSD, no-one will pay.
Do not accept any contributions unless people are willing to transfer (c) to you, or you cannot relicense your work.
Do not use GPL libraries, only BSD-licensed ones, or you cannot relicense your work.
If you are a team or company that does not want to make money from the software, license it under the BSD or Apache license.
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This AC post is right -- you are going about this backwards. Your first question should not be "what license do I use?", it should be "what do I want to happen to my code?" Sit down and decide whether you want to give away the source code or not, whether you want to allow others to modify the code, whether you want to require modifications to be released to the public, and anything else that you think is important.
Once you've done that, picking a license is pretty straightforward. People have already posted links to a bunch of different places that compare licenses. Unless your requirements are pretty unusual, you should be able to find a license that matches them.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Funner version:
Public Domain: You want anyone to use your code free of restrictions. Nobody knows what you wear or what you eat. Your code is for simple binary trees and is published in University textbooks.
BSD: You want anyone to use your code, but not to blame you for it. You have medium hair and a T-shirt. Someone paid you less than minimum wage to write the code, and you use the money to eat at McDonalds. Your code is the TCP/IP protocol and is widely adopted and ubiqutous. Linux people think you're dead.
GPL: You wish everyone would use your code and share their modifications with the world. The only people who end up using it are Linux fanboys. You have long hair and a poncho. You spurn money and instead grow potatoes on your commune. Your code is the fourth non-completed conversion of an IBM PC game from the 1990s listed on sourceforge.
LGPL: You wish you could use the BSD licence, but are afraid the other people on the commune will throw potatoes at you.
Any other Licence: You either fail to realize that all other licences are basically the same as the BSD or GPL licence, or you contribute code to a project that has the same problem. You wear whatever everyone else wears and eat pasta because you heard it was "trendy." Your code calculates the phase of the moon on any past day using the Julian calendar because you can never remember the rules for converting from the Gregorian calendar.