How do I find the open source license that is right for my project?

There are three main families of free software licenses: permissive, weak copyleft and strong copyleft.

There are three main families of free software licenses: permissive, weak copyleft and strong copyleft. Permissive licenses (MIT, BSD and Apache in your list) allow use of your code in proprietary projects without sharing back either their code or your code, if they modified it. Weak copyleft licenses (LGPL, MPL in your list) allow use of your code in proprietary projects, but they should share back your code under the same license if they modified it.

Strong copyleft licenses (GPL) require that they distribute their own code under the same license (GPL here). I recommend against choosing other licenses in your list in order to fight license proliferation. You can read more about free software licenses in Wikipedia, FSF and OSI.

1 For a very nice overview and the fact that you recommended to restrict the choice to commonly used licenses in order to prevent trouble. – paprika Feb 20 '10 at 18:38 Good and concise answer. You may want to change the word "disclosing", and add that all these licenses insist on attribution, so you will always "get credit" if that's all you want.

If you don't want your code to be used in a locked-up proprietary project, use GPL, and if on the contrary you don't want to restrict proprietary software from using your code, use one of the permissive (MIT/BSD/Apache) licenses. – ShreevatsaR Feb 20 '10 at 20:01 Do I loose any rights when I put the code under any of those licenses? Do I need to adhere to the chosen license too?

– bitbonk Feb 20 '10 at 20:09 I think you're not right in that all these licenses insist on attribution. As far as I understand, permissive licenses (at least those listed) require attribution only if you distribute the source code, but attribution is not required for binaries. – codeholic Feb 20 '10 at 20:10 1 @bitbonk You don't loose any rights, you relinquish them ;-) You don't need to adhere to the chosen license, but you cannot revoke the license for the versions of software you've already released under its terms.

Sorry for my English :-) Am I clear? – codeholic Feb 20 '10 at 20:17.

This gives a pretty good outline of what is out there codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/pick-a-lic... There's a tool to help you pick on the Creative Commons site creativecommons.org/choose/ We need something like that for all our code licenses!

1 for the first link, -1 for the second. Creative Commons are not meant for software! Zero result.

– codeholic Feb 20 '10 at 20:23.

This are questions you need to answer on your own. BTW, in my opinion GPL v2 or later is a safe default choice. It is used by those that answer 'yes' to all but the last of my sample questions.

– bitbonk Feb 20 '10 at 20:10 2 You are the owner. You give other people license to use your work on certain terms. – Tadeusz A.

Kadłubowski Feb 20 '10 at 20:23.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.