It seems people have a hard time understanding the implications of licenses, so I have written a something to help with that.
I like how you describe the Don’t Care licenses, aka permissive licenses. A lot of people fall for the narrative that more strict licenses are a burden for other open source developers, and then regret their decision when Evil Corp does what they usually do.
- 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.
- 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.
- Apache. Permissive license. If you really want a permissive license, this is the one to go for.
- 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.
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.
you don’t care that much about the AGPL clauses (e.g. because your app isn’t a server).
I’ve been thinking about this recently… Let’s say you develop some local CLI. You think it’s not a server, so you license as GPL.
Later someone comes and offers your CLI as SaSS. They write the server piece that just calls your local CLI on their server and pipes the input and output between the user.
So… should you always prefer AGPL over GPL?
I have thought about this a lot and done some research on it. Bear in mind, I’m far from an expert, just a curious dev, but I’ve found no reasons to favor GPL over AGPL when AGPL exists. I personally see AGPL as closing a loophole GPL didn’t think of.
One thing I’d wondered if if maybe AGPL hasn’t been tested in court. It has. Not as much as GPL, and I don’t remember if it specifically was the online part, but I definitely found at least one court case involving AGPL code.
