The web community is renowned for its willingness to share. Not only do we share experiences, give advice and help each other with projects, but we also share an incredible amount of code—from small snippets to entire frameworks and applications.
Much of the software we use daily is open-source—from operating systems and servers to the apps we use to ply our trades.
Amid all of this sharing, there arises the issue of copyright and licensing. If you're using someone else's free software, or if you're sharing your own work, it's important to consider these issues.
Standard Copyright
When you create a piece of software, it's automatically protected by copyright. This means that you retain all rights to your source code and that nobody else may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work.
It may also lead to no one using your code—which obviously defeats the purpose of sharing it.
So if you really do want to share your work, but also want to protect it in some way, it's important to consider the options available for licensing your work.
Choosing a License
There are various, recognized licenses you can apply to your work to make it really clear what people can do with your code. But each license has a particular focus, so which should you choose?
In this article, I'll briefly introduce several of the most used licenses. Which one you choose will depend on what you want to achieve and how your code should be distributed.
Disclaimer: the overview that follows only provides a general sense of what each license encompasses. To understand each license fully, you'll need to do more reading.
Continue reading %An Introduction to Open-source Licenses%
by Elio Qoshi via SitePoint
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