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 week 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 1 week 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.

[–] paperplane@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week 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.

[–] paequ2@lemmy.today 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 6 days ago

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.

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