FEBRUARY 24, 2011
As I’ve mentioned before, I recently got a GitHub account and I’m now posting the source to my personal projects there for anyone to see, however this presented an issue as I felt I had to select a specific Open Source License for them instead of just putting the source code out there without any conditions.
While choosing, I had to make some decisions regarding what I wanted others to be able to do with my code. One figures it would just be a matter of filtering the different “major” licenses available and picking the one that fits what you want…
However, I quickly found out that navigating through the legalese (a.k.a. bull**** words to make things complicated) and specific conditions of the different licenses was not as easy as I initially thought (or as easy as it should be). Terms are often vague and confusing or, on the contrary, so specific that one does not know how to interpret them correctly. Licenses also vary in length and legalese content wildly which is why it’s easier to search for comparison charts and tools.
In the end, I ended up choosing the Apache 2.0 license since it “requires preservation of the copyright notice and disclaimer, but it is not a copyleft license — it allows use of the source code for the development of proprietary software as well as free and open source software” (Wikipedia) which is aligned with what I believe Open Source Software should be.
I hope this turns out to be a good decision, if you have any comments or suggestions feel free to chime in on the comment section.