How do I find the open source license that is right for my project? [closed]

Answer 1

This gives a pretty good outline of what is out there

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/pick-a-license-any-license.html

There's a tool to help you pick on the Creative Commons site

http://creativecommons.org/choose/

We need something like that for all our code licenses!

Answer 2

What rights should you grant or deny?

• Are you comfortable with anyone using your program?
• Are you comfortable with anyone modifying your program?
• Are you comfortable with anyone selling your program?
• Are you comfortable with anyone selling modifications of your program?
• Are you comfortable with somebody selling your program as closed source?

This are questions you need to answer on your own.

BTW, in my opinion GPL v2 or later is a safe default choice. It is used by those that answer 'yes' to all but the last of my sample questions.

Answer 3

There are three main families of free software licenses: permissive, weak copyleft and strong copyleft.

Permissive licenses (MIT, BSD and Apache in your list) allow use of your code in proprietary projects without sharing back either their code or your code, if they modified it.

Weak copyleft licenses (LGPL, MPL in your list) allow use of your code in proprietary projects, but they should share back your code under the same license if they modified it.

Strong copyleft licenses (GPL) require that they distribute their own code under the same license (GPL here).

I recommend against choosing other licenses in your list in order to fight license proliferation. You can read more about free software licenses in Wikipedia, FSF and OSI.