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?"

Comments

Re:Important: you can change

[Arker]

One correction - you don't have to require copyright assignments to retain your ability to sell a proprietary product based on your own GPL product. All you have to require is a side-license on contributions - the contributors can still retain copyright on their own code, as long as they grant you a special license that allows you to use those contributions as you will.

Most will not mind doing this in order to get their code into the main tree and have you maintain it. It's a much less onerous requirement than a copyright assignment, but it's just as good for you.