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

One Single Criteria for a License

[jayayeem]

Whatever annoys Stallman the most.

Public Domain or else.

[Purity Of Essence]

Want to help people? Public domain: give it away.

Want to make money? Proprietary license: sell binaries to end users.

No sense in being half-assed about this.