License and Copyright Notice Help

license-help.md

After some modest preliminary research of my own, here are my opinions and what I have learned so far.

These are merely my own personal notes based upon what I've gathered thus far; I am not an expert on these matters so do take everything written here with a grain of salt.

Open Source/Free Software Licenses

First, anything published publicy should have a license (particularly and especially published software).

But why?

• A license is essentially the only thing which grants others permission to use, modify, redistribute, etc., your code.
• A license typically also clarifies that you are providing no warranty whatsoever so that you are not legally liable for anything caused by the use of your software.

Top Selections

• GPL
  • rather complicated
  • long read
  • restrictive
  • many versions (GPLv1, v2, v3) and alternatives (LGPL and its versions, typically used for libraries)
  • copyleft
  • you probably want version 2 (and don't allow those downstream to upgrade the copyleft to v3)

GPL/Copyleft Alternatives (in no particular order)

• MIT

  • easy read
  • used by MIT
  • 2 versions
  • not technically called The MIT License as there is no such thing, but everyone calls it that anyway

• Apache 2.0

  • more thorough
  • longer read
  • incompatible with GPL2, but not GPL3
  • the GNU recomended alternative to the GPL

• BSD

  • 2 or 3 versions, mainly 2 clause and 3 clause

• ISC

  • short and sweet, similar to MIT
  • the default license for new npm packages
  • probably better to just choose one of the above instead however as the ISC has potential wording issues

There is also the so-called Unlicense, although it is seldom used and somewhat unnecessarily complicated. It basically publishes your work as/into the public domain (which forfeits your copyright(s)?) but falls back to a license in certain situations.

The Copyright Notice

• only the word Copyright or © is needed, although both are typically included
• source code usually uses (c) instead of © for some reason (maybe for historical reasons because it's a non-ASCII multibyte character?)
• copyright year is year of first publication
• author and copyright holder are not necessarily the same thing
• https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/401

For those viewng this, please let me know by leaving a comment below if you feel like there's something I got wrong or left out.

More
GNU Licenses Home
GNU License List (maybe somewhat opinionated, but very informative)
https://spdx.org/licenses/
Linus Torvalds GPL v3 criticism
GPL Recommendation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Open-source_criticism
https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/customizing-your-repository/licensing-a-repository
A simple website created by GitHub covering the basics

TLDR:

Use GPLv3 if you want to use a controversial license that few will fully understand (but at least will be compatible with Apache 2.0, but not GPLv2).

Use MIT/BSD/ISC if you want your software stolen and secretly used in proprietary software.

Use Apache 2.0 if you want to be incompatible with GPLv2.

Easy enough. Let's do this!