this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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Programming

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Licenses are boring but you really need one! (distractedmind.home.blog)
submitted 9 months ago by snaggen@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev
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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[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 39 points 9 months 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.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev -2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

MIT - only good for tiny weekend projects like Xorg, Wayland, Mesa, Godot, Jenkins, MUSL, Node.js, Angular, Vue.js, React, Rust, Julia, F#, Rails, PyPy, Redox, and the Haiku Operating System.

AGPL - good for serious projects that you want to be super successful. Widely used software that started off as AGPL includes………. uhh……..wait…….ummm……. lemmy and Mastadon I guess?

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Oh, I'm so sorry I believe projects should use more explicit licences over short ones like MIT. Apache is just more explicit than MIT. The only benefit I see MIT having over Apache is if your code base is so tiny that the Apache license like doubles the file size.

I believe a lot of devs value MIT because it is simple, but that doesn't necessarily make it good. Sometimes code needs to be complex. Licences are the same way. Prefer explicit licenses written by lawyers over simplistic licenses and crayon licenses.

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