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STAT545-UBC / Discussion

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Licenses #445

Open ksedivyhaley opened 7 years ago

ksedivyhaley commented 7 years ago

I'm making my own package and I'd like some insight into choosing a license.

I've read all the links provided and they all seem to assume, at minimum, that the reader/programmer knows (1) how patents are relevant to their work and (2) how they feel about "copyleft" licenses.

I've never shared code and I have a hard time picturing anyone else wanting to use my package at all, let alone how they might use it or how I'd feel about those uses.

I'm leaning towards the MIT license mostly because I'm not sure I care enough to use a less permissive license, but I'm wondering if anyone had any advice for a software/copyright novice...

oganm commented 7 years ago

Let's don't mix patents in here as that's an entirely different topic. MIT is fine for most purposes as long as you don't have an aversion to people shipping your code in commercial closed source products. GPL license is an ideological statement more than anything. In all likelihood it shouldn't cause problems in academia but it will prevent the adoption of your product by most commercial companies or people who hopes their own products will be used by commercial companies.

It all comes down to preference and ethics really

jennybc commented 7 years ago

FWIW I would (and do) default to MIT, so I think your instinct for what to do today is reasonable.

ksedivyhaley commented 7 years ago

Thanks, I'll stick with MIT for now.

daattali commented 7 years ago

I also just stick an MIT license on everything I do, and it's fairly common to use MIT in open source because it's very simple and permissive