Ask HN: Best License for OSS Project

5 points·reggirt··7 comments

I'm planning on open sourceing some hobby projects of mine. Nothing special, really. What is the best license to use for this matter? Anyone should be able to use the code in whatever manner they wish. Thanks for the advise.

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If you expect to receive external contributions, the Apache 2.0 license can be a pretty good choice, because it has a clause to automatically grant you a license on contributions (be them code or just ideas):

> Unless You explicitly state otherwise, any Contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the Work by You to the Licensor shall be under the terms and conditions of this License, without any additional terms or conditions.

I am using it for https://letsblock.it, so that I can ensure the filter corpus is in the right license without requiring a CLA.

I would suggest you check: https://choosealicense.com/

Breaks it down nicely.

CC-0 is designed to be equivalent to placing copywritten work in the public domain (there are jurisdictions that do not have a legal structure for public domain).

There are all sorts of other licenses of course and if CC-0 doesn't meet your needs, talk with your lawyer because any restrictions you want to enforce will require lawyering up to enforce. There are no "gnu police" and MIT an BSD don't enforce the MIT and BSD licenses.

Good luck.

Look at choosealicense.com as suggested.

From what you've said, consider the "MIT" or "MIT No Attribution" (MIT-0) License.

https://github.com/aws/mit-0

Public domain is controversial but has an extreme lack of friction: https://unlicense.org/

CC-0 (Creative Commons Zero) covers similar ground but also covers jurisdictions where there is no legal concept of public domain.

MIT is the best for everyone and best for you because it gives you flexibility when you have contributors

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