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Selecting a Software Licence?

Posted by Cliff on from the an-important-decisions-in-a-coding-project dept.

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?"

4 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. GPL by kurtb149 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I vote for GPL.

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  2. Mix and Match by immcintosh · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    One thing I like about Creative Commons is that their license page basically lets you mix and match license clauses to your own specification. Kinda nice to have a quick pre-build license reserving precisely those rights you desire.

  3. Other Options by endianx · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    What about non open source licensing? Anybody know any good resources for a prebuilt one so you don't have to have an army of lawyers to create one from scratch?

    1. Re:Other Options by madcow_bg · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Why not try Creative Commons? AFAIK the licenses say nothing about the source, but the work itself. You have very large freedom of modifications to say exactly what you want to be done with your software.