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I remember reading this article back when it came out, and it made me think a lot about software licenses.

I encourage everyone here to invest some time to read the different libre and open source licenses out there and decide which one would be the best for the software they produce.

The choice of a software license is important and is a political choice.

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I recommend not spending too much time researching the license. For copyleft there are not that many choices that are standard enough for people to be comfortable using your code (GPL, LGPL, MPLv2 and maybe some ecosystem specific licenses like the EPL).

For BSD-style licenses there is Apache for large projects (which has your back) and a myriad of others that does not.

> For BSD-style licenses there is Apache for large projects (which has your back) and a myriad of others that does not.

I don't know, the BSDs seem to be doing pretty well without Apache licenses.

They are, but if you start a new project and you want a permissive license you should probably choose Apache 2.0. It grants the same rights as an MIT or BSD license but also includes an explicit patent grant and a section that deals with the licensing of contributions.

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