SEANK.H.LIAO

license to hack

biased overview of open source licenses

licenses

open source licenses, a confusing and contentious topic, some treat it like a religion, but it should probably be treated as a tool, choose the right one for the job

choose a license is a great resource

tl;dr legal is also nice

If your goal is to share your work with little care for how it is used, and not participate in religious evangelism, MIT or BSD-3 hits the sweet spot between formality and freedom

Listed below is generally in order of leat to most restrictive.

CC0

Do what you want, disclaims copyright

The Unlicense

same as CC0

MIT

do what you want, just keep this (combined) license and copyright notice

BSD-2

same as MIT

BSD-3

same as MIT express prohibition of using project / contributors name without permission

Apache-2

same as MIT express grant of patent use by contributors

MPL

copyleft, source + mods of originally MPL code must remain available under MPL or stricter, source can be copied into other projects

LGPL

copyleft, source + mods of originally LGPL code must remain available under MPL or stricter can only be dynamically linked by other projects

GPL-2

copyleft, source + mods + build + install of entire derived work must remain available under GPL-2 or stricter

GPL-3

GPL-2, plus patents

AGPL

GPL, but includes everything over the network