Showing posts with label licenses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label licenses. Show all posts

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Which Open Source License?

I was doing a little research on open source software licenses with a student when I came across this flow chart.


I like the balance it strikes between being funny and still being at least somewhat useful and informative.  Credit for the original flowchart goes to the creators Dan Bentley and Brian Fitzpatrick.  (Thanks to @jldeev for pointing me to the chart.)

For a short break down of the key differences between some of the more popular software licenses, see Jeff Atwood's post Pick a License, Any License on the Coding Horror blog.  The main point to take away from the article is that if you don't explicitly declare a license on software you publish, your code is copyrighted by default.  To use the code people have to contact you and ask permission.  So if you post a lot of code examples on your blog, take a few minutes to pick a license then add a notice to the footer of your site.