this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Licenses are boring but you really need one! (distractedmind.home.blog)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

It seems people have a hard time understanding the implications of licenses, so I have written a something to help with that.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 month ago (17 children)
  1. AGPL. Strictest. You want a strict license. Don't let people take advantage of you. I see no good reason to pick GPL when AGPL exists.
  2. LGPL. If you want people to be able to use it (but not modify it) without their code having to be FLOSS as well. Still quite strict relatively with everything below.
  3. Apache. Permissive license. If you really want a permissive license, this is the one to go for.
  4. MIT. Permissive but less explicit. Okay for super short code.

Avoid at all costs CC0. CC0 explicitly does not give patent rights. MIT implicitly does.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (8 children)

A good reason to pick GPL is if you want to allow GPL software to integrate yours and you don't care that much about the AGPL clauses (e.g. because your app isn't a server).

CC0 might be a good fit for trivial template repos where you don't want to burden downstream projects with having to include copyright notices.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

AGPL and GPL v3 are explicitly compatible, IIRC. You can run into some trouble with v2.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What I mean is that you (IIUC) can't use an AGPL library in a GPL app without relicensing the whole thing to AGPL. For many larger projects relicensing is a huge hassle and often a non-starter if there aren't very good reasons for it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

You're right, the explicit permission is only the other way around.

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