Software Licenses — The Legal Side of Open Source Projects — What|Why|How
Beginners who use GitHub must have come accross the Add A License option and might have clicked on Apache or MIT License to complete the setup of their project. I did the same too and didn’t bother to know about these licenses but I used them just because some popular projects used them. I went through a lot of articles and compiled this complete guide to Open Source Licenses.
What Are Open Source Licenses?
An open-source license is a type of license for computer software and other products that allows the source code, blueprint or design to be used, modified and/or shared under defined terms and conditions.
In simpler words, an open source software license tells others what they can and can’t do with your source code.
There are a number of licenses available today which you can use in your project. MIT License, Apache License 2.0, GNU GPL to name a few. Every license caters to different kinds of requirements of the project. I’ll discuss the uses of some of the most popular licenses later in the article.
Is it necessary to use a license for my Open Source Software (OSS)?
Any creative work (code, graphic, etc.) that you create is legally under Exclusive Copyright by default.
Exclusive Copyright means that means nobody else can use, copy, distribute, or modify your work without being at risk of take-downs, shake-downs, or litigation.
However, Open Source work is an exception to this as you expect that other people will use, modify and share your work. This means that whoever contributes to your project will have an exclusive copyright for his/her own work which implies that even you wouldn’t be able to use, modify or share the contributions people made to your own project. Therefore, it is always necessary to use a license for an Open Source Project.
Is GitHub public project open source?
Making your GitHub project public doesn’t imply that your project is Open Source. A GitHub public project comes under GitHub’s Terms and Conditions which gives an Exclusive Copyright to your project. To let people contribute legally to your project, you’ll have to include a license.
It is easy for beginners today to include licenses in their projects because they are standardized and they can include it easily in their projects.
According to Ben Batler,
A standardized license serves as a proxy for those without legal training to know precisely what they can and can’t do with the software. Unless absolutely required, avoid custom, modified, or non-standard terms, which will serve as a barrier to downstream use of the agency code.
What license should you choose?
Starting a project from a blank slate
You can include MIT License if you are starting from scratch and your project is small. Babel, Rails use this license.
MIT License is ashort and simple permissive license with conditions only requiring preservation of copyright and license notices. Licensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code.
Concerned about patents and copyrights
You can include Apache License 2.0 in your project. It is similar to MIT License but also provides an express grant of patent rights from contributors to users.
A permissive license whose main conditions require preservation of copyright and license notices. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. Licensed works, modifications, and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code.
GNU General Public License v3.0
This is of not much of use for the beginners, however if you want to know about this more, you can click here.
Permissions of this strong copyleft license are conditioned on making available complete source code of licensed works and modifications, which include larger works using a licensed work, under the same license. Copyright and license notices must be preserved. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights.
I will be writing an article about copyleft licenses soon.
Know more about choosing a license
GitHub has created a website called Choose A License. Here you can find the full text of these licenses, and instructions on how to use them, on choosealicense.com
You can find comparison table of all the licenses and approvals here.
If this article helped you anyhow, please follow me > Aayush Joglekar. You can comment on this article to contribute to this discussion on Open Source Software Licenses.
This is the first article under my new What-Why-How Series where I will be going through features, technologies and topics. I’ll be talking about what they are, why are they useful and how to use them. Keep a check for more articles. Thank You for reading.
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