How to choose an open source license

June 21st, 2006

Ed Burnette at ZDNet has a thoughtful and pretty fair post on how to choose an open source license for your project.

He provides a decision tree - simply answer the questions, follow the tree down and the entry will recommend a certain license for you. He also has a follow-up posting which details open source licenses and will allow you to see information about the license such as whether it allows commercial use, copyright protection, etc.

Many open source programmers I know have been choosing the GPL recently - probably because everyone else does it. I know the reason I initially chose to use the GPL was because everyone else used it, I was a big fan of standardization and it meant I could use code from other GPL-licensed projects.

More recently I’ve become more liberal and I’m trying to license new creations under the BSD. The only reason many of my projects are still GPL are because they contain code from other GPL projects and I cannot change the license until I remove or rewrite them.

As the article describes, the GPL is mis-understood by many. The GPL actually imposes restrictions which may put users off using your software. It’s also quite frustrating for programmers who don’t use the GPL as it means they can’t use your code. In my opinion, if you want to open source you might as well go the full way and get a BSD license which is about 12 lines long and easy to read rather than a GPL license which requires a lawyer to read and imposes restrictions on use.